You Are Enough - Part II #TheOnePercent

Hey, everybody. Ryan here. Welcome back to the show. Thanks for hanging out with me. Hey. It's now been almost six months since I had an experience that I shared here on the show. I'm sitting in the chair where I shared that episode, which was called you'd are Enough. And that experience and that podcast was a discovery that I had last September when I was at Burning man, where I realized that I had been operating my entire life through the lens of not being enough, which is what led me to a lot of the behaviors that now I want to change. And as I've worked through a lot of therapy and as I have worked through a lot of self reflection, I have found that a lot of my, my character traits that I don't like come from experiences that I had between the ages of 12 and 14 when my parents were splitting, when I was changing schools, when I was trying to figure out who I was as a man, as I went through puberty alone in a now fatherless home. And I've really realized how much of my behaviors that I would call negative come from that part of my life. So it's been about six months since I had that experience and I've continued the work through the last six months and I've discovered a lot more ever since then. And I first of all want to thank all of you who have reached out on Instagram through social media, who have written in via email. This has been my most well received podcast in a long time and it's very humbling and vulnerable to share the kinds of things that I have been sharing on the show lately. So thank you for the love and the acceptance that you've sent my way via social media. And so many of you, particularly men, have reached out and said, I thought I was the only one. I thought I was the only one who operated my life this way. And me sharing about this has given some freedom for many of us hard chargers to realize what is underneath the hood of what makes us hard chargers. And I'm fascinated by this. I am fascinated and become even more fascinated with the human psyche and why we do what we do as I go deeper into the work. So that was six months ago when I started sharing that, when I had that experience for myself, when I started opening up about this. But going deeper under the hood, I discovered there's more there, there's even more underneath that thought. And so what I wanted to give those of you who have responded about this topic or this theme is what I've discovered under the hood since then in hopes that in your own journey you're able to go under the hood even more in yourselves. So, as I stated, I discovered that a lot of my triggers, a lot of my.

Self defeating behavior came from when I was between the ages of 12 and 14, maybe a little bit younger, maybe 10 and 14, when my parents were splitting and they were back and forth for a long time, several times, and for several years I would come home to an empty house by myself and felt lonely and lost and would eat as a distraction. And I would look at other men looking for some sort of leadership because mine had just left. So I'm looking for anyone to kind of show me the way, show me the path. And so I clung to male friendships, I clung to male mentors. There was actually quite a few years where people thought I was gay because I was, I was looking for any sort of male leadership. And I.

During that time felt very lost and very, very scared. And that ultimately is what led me to hide in the computer lab in middle school and learn HTML programming, which led me to become an Internet marketer, which led me to this podcast that I'm sharing with you today. So you connect the dots backwards, but still a lot of that pain was driving my behavior. Of workout addiction, of attention addiction.

The need to perform, or the need to succeed in order to prove to myself that I could do it on my own, that I was valuable, that I was enough. Well, I do regular therapy and I continue to go deeper into, you know, the story of who I am. And I attended a workshop here in Austin, is actually led by my buddy Ian Stanley and his business partner Brent Charlton. And they do a series of workshops called Lionheart. And there was a really interesting process described in that workshop, and I'll try to summarize it in 30 to 60 seconds. The basic thesis is that.

Things happen to us when we're young. We develop an outer coating to protect against what happened when we were young. And if we're lucky and if we work at it, we work through the shell and become fully realized adults. So you have a child who is scared, a child who is vulnerable, a child who is, who is open. And then you have things happen to that, to that child. And so the teen comes in, covers it up with a lot of beliefs, a lot of walls, a lot of outer shells, and some of us just stay there, some of us just stay there. So that might be evidenced in the kid who was picked on when they were young and now they go to the gym as a way of protecting the child from being picked on ever again. But they're a gym addict. They go to the gym all the time. Because it's actually not about health. It is not about even reaching a goal. It is about protecting the inner wound from ever happening again. You have someone who is left alone. That child now develops the teen who sleeps around in order to feel any source of connection. And it's really not about the connection at all. It's not about the fun of it at all. It is actually about the attempt to heal the inner wound that was caused as a child. I found this very, very interesting, mostly in the same way that I found Aubrey Marcus talk that I shared in the previous episode of youf Are Enough. In the same way that I found an insight he gave me about being enough as just a way to explore. Does this show up for me? I started to have the same questions, the same.

The same understanding around this idea of those three levels of child, teen and adult. So I started to wonder, where in my life, where in my life does this show up for me? Where do I overcompensate? Or do I create behaviors in order to protect something that happened? And what I realized through this process, my big aha, my big takeaway was that, yes, I have identified that things that happened to me between the ages of 11ish and 14 in middle school when my parents were separating caused a lot of destructive behaviors for myself. And I realized that I was operating with this sense of feeling like I wasn't enough. And that caused me to.

Succeed and it caused me to also feel lonely. And yes, yes, I'm aware of all this. But something that I had never thought of before was, what about when I was nine?

What about when I was not yet going through that transition period? What was like, what was life like before then? What was I like before then? What was I like before I started covering up the pain? What was I like before I had to impress other people? What was I like before I cared about what my body looked like? Now, a bit of context here. I have shared publicly. I did an episode with my buddy Alex called Working vs. Creating. And I talked about how I actually struggle to have fun in my life. I would think about work most of the time. You might call that workaholism, where I get most of my needs met via work. I prone to work too much. I'm prone to think about work too much. And I don't really have another outlet. I don't have a hobby that I really like. Nothing. I don't have my passion. Like I Don't know what that is. I don't have those things. Yes, I love baseball, and that's a big outlet for me. So right now, as I'm recording this, it's winter, so I basically stare out the window and wait for spring training to start. And I'll be going to spring training to see the Indians play in Arizona anyway. Besides that, I don't really have any hobby or interest besides business or work, so I am prone to workaholism. But when I was nine, I loved computers. That's true. I spent a lot of time on computers, but I didn't love to work. I was playing. That's what you do when you're a kid. And then when I was 12, later on, when I had to, you know, I came home to the empty house and was feeling on my own. You know, my mom had to go back to work to provide for her family. She now had to be mom and dad and balance all kinds of different things. And I have so much more empathy for her now and what she was going through and how awful, unbelievably painful that must have been for her. But my story was, I'm on my own, and I gotta figure this out. So I shut off.

That fun, playful kid, and I became an adult in my mind. Said, I will figure out how to make money. I will figure out how to be healthy. I will figure out how to be fit. I will figure out how to what I believe about my faith later on. And these are all the journeys that I have been on ever since, which is a beautiful, wonderful thing.

But many times I have found for myself, and when I talk to other entrepreneurs, specifically, I find resonance with this, is that we're on this path. We're on this journey to discover something, to get somewhere. And many times we have this sense of, we will do the thing, we will do the work so that we can blank on the other side.

And what was interesting for me was that I have a really hard time identifying what's on the other side.

And it wasn't until I went through this process and started to go deeper into the work that I started to see, wow, I've really shut off that part of me that likes to have fun. I've really shut it off. I don't really have access to it.

I love to have fun. I like to have a good time. But ask me what I find fun, and I'm like, I don't know. What hobbies do you have? I'm not really sure.

So I started to think about what was it like before that hard time, before the outer shell got put on?

What was life like then? Well, the truth of the matter is that as a kid I had lots of fun. Do you have any idea what I did as a kid? I would dress up and I would put on entertainment shows for like kids in the neighborhood and I would like do whatever a nine year old version of improv is. And I was a natural leader in my peer group and I did read about business and investing and that was fun for me. And I loved baseball and I was a fun kid. So I had this story in my mind of like, I don't really know how to have fun. I don't really know what to do there. But the truth was it's my natural state. I've just covered it up with all these things to protect the kid who felt like he wasn't enough, who felt that he was scared and alone and on his own. And so when we erase all of that or when we go to the, to the, to the true essence of ourselves, the true nature of ourselves, there's a lot of interesting wisdom there because we all are born with some sort of DNA mapping where we're all wired for certain things and certain traits. We don't come out of the womb perfectly malleable. We have personalities coming out of the womb. Ask anyone who has a one or a two year old. They get personalities real quick and you didn't put them there. Now where that comes from, who knows. But the fact is we are all wired with certain, certain innate traits, certain innate desires, certain innate things that we find interesting. And as kids, when our brains start to attach to the things that we find enjoyable, when we find playful, those stay with us for the rest of our lives. And my buddy Jesse Elder said once, so much of the personal development movement and so much of the work that we do is just to get back to that state where there is just pure beingness, there is pure essence of ourselves. That's when we're free. It's when we're just human. You know, a frog never wakes up in the morning and says, what am I gonna do to make sure that I stand out in the crowd? Or what am I gonna do to make sure that I get ahead? Or worry about their own self actualization. No, this is a uniquely human thing. A frog is a frog and it's fully frog just by being a frog. And as a kid, I think we're the closest to that as a kid. As young children, we are the closest to pureness. The closest to full actualization presence happiness with what is when you're that young and you could say it's because all things are taken care of for you or whatever, but the truth is when you're five and six, you just want to have a good time. Today, my 3 year old doesn't care about my social status. She doesn't care that daddy has money. She doesn't care about the car I drive, although she really likes to sit in the backseat and say, daddy, let's play Wii. Which is when I slam on the accelerator in the Tesla and she goes wee.

So she enjoys the moment. But there is no worry about status or other people's status or how people perceive her. She is fully her in everything that she is now. All of this is to say that at some point, for me anyway, there's a changing of that there's something that changes.

And for me that changed when my parents split and I felt like I was on my own. And.

I've described the story of how for the rest of my life, up until recently, I was operating with this sense of not being enough. But I discovered after exploring this that there was a belief one layer lower.

There's a. There's a belief that caused.

The belief of not being enough.

And below the surface of this idea of not being enough.

Before that belief, there's this happy kid, this fun kid, this present kid. You know, I think about my daughter, I think about how playful she is, I think about how loving she is, I think about how open she is. I think about how she has no judgment.

She has no expectations.

That was me too. So what changed? And I know when it changed, but I can now identify that there was a different belief that came up. And it was the belief that something is wrong with me.

Something is wrong with me.

And I can remember as I play with that idea of going back to childhood.

Fully happy, fully self actualized, fully realized, if such a thing exists.

And then something changes. Parents leave, parents split.

For me, I changed schools. So I went from the super Christian, private, expensive school to being in public school where.

Kids are having sex, kids are talking about sex.

There'S kids smoking, kids dress a certain way, they talk about things I've never heard of before. I'm thrown into it and I immediately feel like I don't belong. And at the same time I'm going home alone to an empty house.

Something's different, something's weird, something's wrong with me.

And that was what.

Opened up the door for the next belief of not being Enough.

I've spent a lot of time with my good buddy JP Sears, and JP Co hosted the Capitalism conference with me. He's become one of my best friends here in here in Austin, Texas. And JP talks a lot about embracing one's weirdness.

And it's the idea of what makes you unique, what makes you, you.

And what I realize now is those are the same things that are weird about me and make me who I am, that make me unique are the same things that were that way when I was younger, when I was a kid, when I was a child.

And those are the things I love most about myself. I love the fact that I ask hard questions about business, life, money, relationships, religion, that I buck the trend that I'm constantly pursuing truth, which is why I love getting haters on social media who tell me I'm going to hell or I'm a scam artist or whatever it is. I love getting that because I have to know exactly who I am and be committed to the pursuit of truth in order to deal with something like that. So I love that game.

I also love my weird sense in music, my sense in, like, I love David Archuleta and like, weird Carly Rae Jepsen and like pop edm and which is.

It doesn't match a lot of the rest of my life. And I love that about it too. These weird things about me that make me who I am were the same when I was a kid.

I still love baseball the same way I loved baseball when I was a kid. So I feel like our uniqueness, my belief as of right now is that our uniqueness, the thing that makes us who we are, is almost innate to us. But at some point along the way, we adopt a belief that that isn't good enough or that something is wrong with that. And so we go through these behaviors, we go through these things to change that about ourselves. We go through long, laborious processes.

To do things in spite of that person, in spite of who we are. We force ourselves to do things that we don't want to do in order to get the result that we think that we want so that we can tell ourselves that we're whole.

And so I've started to play with this idea of, well.

What if nothing was wrong in the first place?

What if there was? Do I see anything wrong with my daughter? No. I tell her every night before she goes to bed that I love her exactly as she is. There's nothing she could ever do to make me love her less.

I tell her that every day.

And so doesn't that mean it's also true for me?

And maybe it wasn't true.

Maybe there are, you know, in the church, I grew up in the church, and there were certainly things in my background that I could do to make God love me less. Now in a, as an adult, I realize that's not true.

Regardless of what you believe about God, if we just say, you know the world, if there is nothing, then there's literally nothing that you can do to change your worth in the world.

And if you do believe in God, then.

The God as I know him or it is that there's nothing you could do to change how much he loves you. And if you have a child and you look at them, you know that there's nothing that they could do to change how you view them. So is that not also the case with you?

And so if that is the case, if there was nothing wrong in the first place, if there was nothing wrong with us from the very beginning, then all of the things that we do in spite of ourselves are unnecessary. All the things, all of the habits that we have done against our will, in spite of our happiness are unnecessary. It means that they're learned. It means that they're learned in order to stack up against someone else. It means that when we're doing things against our will, when we're doing things in order to get a result, we're usually doing it in order to compare ourselves to, to someone else because we believe that something is wrong with us and we need to do something about it in order to feel like we are whole again. In order to feel like we are enough.

So there's so many of you listening who listen to me from my business thoughts and my financial predictions and what I'm investing in and the businesses that I'm building. And so many of you write in and say, what is the process? What's the thing I need to do in order to get such and such a result? And I know so many of you who build businesses that you don't like, that you don't want to build, that you don't care about because you're trying to get the result so that you can blank.

And I know because I've done it too.

I know because I've done it too. Now, I was always as a kid, wired to find new hacks and tricks to trade baseball cards to. I literally went door to door, knocking on doors, asking if I could shovel drives, ask if I could rake leaves. I was born an entrepreneur. It's in me. It's baked in me. But many people are in a certain business because of the result, because. Because of the money. So that they can justify a lifestyle, so they can stack up to other people, so that they can feel whole. Because somewhere along the way, they bought into the lie that who they were wasn't enough and something was wrong with exactly who they are. And I know because I've done it.

I've done it. Hell, I know I've done it at the gym. I know I've done it in fitness. I know I've bought into the lie that my body shape or what I look like.

Wasn'T what I thought girls would want. Or since, you know, at 12, I.

Felt like I had to be the man of. Not necessarily the house, but man of, like, my life. I had to look a certain way to be considered a real man.

I know I've done that.

What if nothing was wrong in the first place? But if nothing was wrong with you in the first place, what if the thing that makes you happiest is actually the path through which your greatness comes out?

You know, when I look at famous entrepreneurs, when I look at people who have done great things, so many of them are so in their natural core identity, that natural essence of who they are, they're not following other people's plans. They're not following.

The best tips practices. They're doing what is unique to them, which is what creates value, which gives you the greatest upside. It's not by following another plan. It's not by.

It might not even be by building the business at all. I mentioned my buddy JP earlier, but he's a great case study of somebody who was terrified to let his natural humor, his natural personality come out in his work because he thought it would be bad for business. And last night he sent me a video of him hugging Tony Robbins and doing standup for Tony and his insiders group.

The things that make us who we are are usually our path to greatness. Which is really, really weird. It's really weird because that greatness is what gets you the admiration of other people and makes you the most money. But it doesn't matter at that point because when you're doing exactly what it is that makes you you and makes you the happiest, it doesn't matter what the money is. God, I would hate this conversation. When I was 23, I would think I was so out there and stupid and foolish and one with the universe, some hippie BS.

But I know that when I was 23, I was operating under the assumption that I had to do something in order to get the money, in order to get the result, to justify the wound that I had, that I was alone, that I wasn't enough, and that I had to prove to myself that I was. And I was doing all of that in spite of my greatest happiness. Had I just stuck to what made me happy, if I had just stuck to, if I had never believed the lie that something was wrong with me and I had doubled down on all the things that I loved to do when I was a kid.

I would have been happy and richer and successful all along the way. And so I tell you all of this because Internet entrepreneurs, and especially in 20, 19 and beyond, are just particularly guilty of this idea of comparing ourselves to other people, reinforcing this idea that something is right with the rest of the world and something is wrong with us, when it is the very thing that makes us weird, the very thing that makes us who we are, the very thing that makes us unique, that maybe even the thing that we are most afraid other people will find out about us, that is the thing that separates us from everything else and is your greatest path to creating value in the world, which means success, fame, riches, whatever, whatever you want to being intentional with the life that we want. And when we're doing things in spite of what we want, we tend to attract or spend our times with other things that reinforce that. And so we live our lives in this gap between.

What we're working toward and what we want. No wonder we lose sight of who we are and we feel lost so much of the time.

We are particularly guilty in this world, in our industry of people who sell products on the Internet, of people who market our businesses on the Internet, people who are involved with social Media, people under 50 who grew up with the Internet at some point in their lives. We are so guilty of using that as a way to compare ourselves to the rest of the world, reinforce the belief that we got somewhere along the way that.

Something was wrong with us and that we're trying to fix that thing. And then we project it onto other people. We project it by sharing our opinions and debating other people's opinions and having these ridiculous political conversations or.

Showcasing our lives in a way that is made to be perfect when we know it's not perfect. But we showcase. We showcase. We showcase the best of it and shield all of the pain because we want to give this projection of us having figured it out, this projection of there's nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with me in the first place. All while we believe that there is something, which is why we feel the need to project something, something different in the first place. And so what we do with that is we continue the cycle, we continue the hamster wheel of showcasing what we think it's supposed to be like. And then we make it harder for other people to measure up in their minds. And so we reinforce with other people that something is wrong with them and that they have to fix something along the way. Where. What if there was just nothing wrong in the first place?

What if that was the case? What if it was? What if when you were a kid, you never bought into the lie that something was wrong with you? Now I'm projecting right now. It happened for me. I don't know if it's ever happened to you, but what if. I know from my life, if I had never bought into the idea that something was wrong with me, I would have continued to operate, just fascinated with the things.

That made me happy.

And all of the other things would have been added unto me as well. All the other things would have come. Especially today when we live in a world where the platforms that exist can amplify whatever message, whatever product you want to bring to the world.

And instead we use them as platforms to reinforce our beliefs about ourselves. I'm pointing to my forehead. It's all up here, folks. Everything that we want and everything that we do ultimately so comes back to the beliefs that we have about ourselves. The amount of money that you make will be in direct proportion to what you think you are worth. God, that sounds so law of attraction. I hate that. I so hate that. But I am realizing this about myself.

About the things that I did in order to fix something about me.

Were never necessary.

And ever since I've had this realization, I now am able to communicate from a genuine place with other people.

Because I can speak about what I want and who I am without attachment to the result. Because if the result conflicts with who I am and what I want.

Then I don't want it.

Do I want a hundred million dollar business.

Or do I want a business.

That allows me to keep creating the value that I want to bring to the world?

And would I give up the giving value to the world for the hundred million dollar business?

If those two things conflict.

Then I'm doing a disservice to my overall happiness.

By trading the thing that is what I want to do and bring to the world.

And so often we look at the result and we reverse engineer the result.

Rather than look at what we want.

And then living for what it is that we want.

Dramatic pause.

That's all. That's all I wanted to share with you.

It's okay for you to want what you want, and it's. And it's okay for you to be who you are. And there was nothing ever wrong with that in the first place. So you don't need to make your ads look like everybody else's ads. You don't need to make your product look like everybody else's product. You don't need to make your body look like everybody else's body. You don't need to make your message look like everybody else's message. It's kind of boring. You don't need to make your house look like other people's house.

Because there was nothing wrong in the first place. It's your life.

And the minute that you start doing things because you need to project something, you are now in violation with who you are, that makes you unique. So just be you, because there's nothing wrong with that in the first place.

And the minute you get that, if you're anything like me, if you get that, then you can actually communicate with other people from a genuine place about what you want to do next, where you want to go, what you want to do, who you want to be, the goals you want to have. And because you'll be operating from that place, the minute you set a goal, it'll feel good to work like hell. It'll feel good to hustle. It won't be in spite of yourself. It won't be because you have to, because you want to. And wanting to do it versus having to do it are really, really different energies.

If this doesn't resonate with you, well.

You know, you're probably not listening right now, but if it did, let me know on Instagram. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. As always, I'm rooting for you. And, you know, it wasn't until I met a couple really important people in my life, my best friend Mark, Mark Jenny, and Travis Sago, my longest standing mentor, that I really felt like I had real leadership in my life because they were just happy for me. They were just happy for.

Who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. And.

I told. I told my therapist recently that I wanted to be Travis for the rest of the world. I want to be Travis for the young kid who bought into the lie that he wasn't good enough, that he couldn't do it, that he couldn't live the life that he wanted. So thank you for letting me live in my purpose now that I feel like I found it. So I really am rooting for you. I really am happy for you when you kill it. If this resonated with you, let me know. Thanks for listening.