Not Waiting

Hi, guys. My name is Donnie Rouse. So you are listening to the podcast One Life. There's a quote by Roomie which goes like this. It says, as you walk on the way, the way appears. I was at the gym last week and I was working out, and I saw a buddy that I hadn't seen in a while, my friend Miles. We started talking. He was sharing me some of the. Some of the updates in his life. He is a singer, amongst many other things. And then he was sharing with me some of his aspirations that he has for life. And one of those aspirations is travel, which I'm very, very well versed in. And he was talking about travel and how he has these dreams to travel to all these different places, one of the places being Japan. And as he was telling me about this, I could see him light up as he went through these ideas, these plans that he wanted for some point to happen in the future. And I asked him a simple question. I said, well, why haven't you? And the answer he gave me was, because none of his friends want to go or he can't get any of his friends to commit to a trip. My response back to him was, why wait? And the reason I say that is because I been traveling for probably almost 20 years. And in those 20 years of travel, there's been a few times and I learned not to even rely on anybody anymore. But there's been a few times where I had invited people to come along with me or I wasn't going to take a trip unless someone came along with me. And what I found was that you can't wait on anybody to fulfill your dreams. I think the trip was Thailand. One of my friends who had never traveled out of the country before told me that he wanted to go on one of these trips with me. So I said, okay, no, I won't book it yet. I'll wait for you. Let's try to book it by the end of February, whatever the month was. I kept pinging him and pinging him and pinging him, and he said, oh, well, you know what? Another job just came in. I can't commit to it yet. Another job came in, I can't do it yet. And what I found was that there was always an excuse for him not to go. And you might say, well, you know what? Well, he had work. He of course can go, but my friend is very well off and he doesn't need to work and take these other jobs, especially since most of the time when I hear him talking about the job, he's Complaining about it. But he was more afraid of making that trip than he was of being caught in that regular routine and just want to continue to work. So I ended up booking it alone and had an amazing experience. So I was telling my friend Miles, going through all the different experiences he would have as a result of just doing it and doing it alone, because we have this. We get afraid because there's this unknown factor to it. But that unknown factor is very much what we're going to look. That's the juice. That is what makes the experience worthwhile. If you knew for certainty everything that was going to happen on the trip, the trip would suck. You wouldn't be excited. You would have none of those emotional rushes that make the trip what it is. It's that the grit, that figuring it out on the spot, that's what makes you grow as a traveler. As a traveler, you can put me in any situation, any country, and I am very confident that I will be able to move around, navigate, meet people. That is what travel gives you. It gives you this sense of certainty. To switch gears a little bit, I'm going to talk about my friend Lucas, one of my best, best friends. And we were talking about business. I was sharing him some aspects of my business, and he was sharing me some of his. And I was talking about a business plan. He said, listen, don't wait for a business plan. They're irrelevant. And this is something I'd heard over and over. They say, start with a pitch deck because it is important to know exactly where you are going. Otherwise, how do you know how to get there? But the lesson I had gotten from Lucas, he was telling me about his business plan and how he had projected that his business was going to go in a certain direction. And after listening to the market, it did a complete 180, like, 100% different than what he initially planned for his business. Well, how true of that is life. You know, so many times we have a direction even for I could relate to through my own business, my business of coffee and cold roman. I used to describe cold roman a certain way when I would present it to people, saying, hey, it's a bottle of espresso. It's ready. And then over time, the language in which I use became. It adapted and modified because my understanding of the product, my understanding of what the market wanted changed. And how was this all kind of tied down? And then how. How does this all tie down to what the topic is? The topic is the habit of not waiting. The habit of not waiting is taking the Imperfect action and not waiting for everything to be perfect. Because chances are, if you have this very specific plan, it's going to deviate anyways. It's good to have this vision as what it is you're going for. And I believe, I'm a firm believer that is extremely important, especially for your life. The emotions you want to feel, the relationships you want to have. It is very good to have a very definite vision for those categories of your life, but also to leave some room open. If you believe in the universe, if you believe in God, having too rigid of a system closes you off to all the other possibilities. Oprah Winfrey, when they spoke about her success, the interviewer said, did you have any idea as to how successful, how big you were going to get? She said, not at all. There's no way in my life that I ever could have planned for this. But she took the one step at a time. And as she continued to evolve, things started to present them. New opportunities came and she continued to grow. And now she's one of the most influential, powerful, successful women in the entire world. So I thought about imperfect action and I thought about my. In my own life, as I'm working on my company, I'm part of this business class where it's about people who are like minded, people who want to serve, people who want to create businesses with purpose. And as I was going through these course modules, there was this resistance that kept meeting me because I'm like, I don't know what the definite answer is, how I'm supposed to complete this assignment. What if I write down the assignment? All of a sudden, now this is not the direction I want to go. And I kept circling in my mind going through this thing, and as a result, I wouldn't get anything done. But then something happened at the new year. I was like, you know what, Let me just, I'm just going to write stuff down. Things will come. And I trusted in that process. And as a result of doing that, as a result of actually putting the effort and just not giving myself a little bit of a time constraint, but not pressuring myself. What I found was that by completing these different assignments and talking to different people, putting myself in different experiences, that my, my vision for the business started to evolve. It started to become bigger than what it is now. And it also changed me emotionally. If you would have asked me three months back, or probably three months back and you had asked me what did I want to do with my business, I was ready to walk away from everything. And then the reason I was ready to do that was because there was this belief inside of me that my business was going to be my captor. My business was going to lock me down. It was going to imprison me to have to work in a corporate office and have all these other experiences that I don't want to have. But the real question is, who's in charge of the life that I'm living now? And would I ever in my million years let that happen? Not at all. Not a chance in hell would I ever let my business deter me from the life that I want to live. And I believe that the two can work congruently, the two can work together. And I spent all this time fearing something that I didn't want to happen, when in reality I was making it happen because that was what I was focusing on, rather than asking a better question, saying, you know what? What is it that I really desire? How do I want to impact people with this? What do I want my role in my business to be? What is going to light me up every single day? What am I going to enjoy doing every single day that will make me feel like I'm living it with purpose and I feel passionate about it? Different questions and I got different answers. As a result of an exercise I did a couple weeks ago, I wrote a calendar and I put all these different aspirations I had and I plugged it into a calendar. What that calendar did, and I touched upon this in one of the prior episodes. What that calendar did was allow me to put it into time. And by putting into time, all of a sudden I found myself naturally asking the questions, well, what do I have to do now to make this? Wow. I just put this. I'm building a well for children or a village in South Africa that has to happen by the 19th of August. Wow. How am I going to make that happen? How am I going to make that a reality? Oh, man. And then my mind started backtracking and saying, okay, well, what has to happen the month of July? What has to happen the month of June? And it was always very difficult for me to plan anything because I hated planning. And I used to say, oh, well, I am, you know, I just like to go with the flow. I don't like planning because planning takes too much time. Planning prevents you from moving forward. When that was false, I was just. I was bullshitting myself. I didn't like planning because I hated. I thought it was tedious. I didn't like sitting there and trying to plan it out. But now it seems a little bit More exciting. So the habit of not waiting, if it comes down to anything, if there's one lesson you take from this is to take action, take imperfect action. Again, I'll read that quote from Rumi because I think it's so important. As you walk the way, the way appears. As you walk on the way, the way appears again, you go through life. We have these habitual ways of living life, or if you eat lunch at a certain time, go to the gym at a certain time, call a friend at a certain time, all these things we start to do automatically. And we develop these patterns, which now we have these patterns. The patterns are the ones that is exactly what's guiding us. We aren't even in charge of our own lives anymore. So we must take charge. And the charge, taking charge starts by taking imperfect action, by seeing even if we don't clearly know exactly where we are going or what we want, we have an essence. We kind of know what we want. Right. Think of your body, for example. You might say, you know what? I'm putting on a little extra weight over the holidays. Too much turkey dinner and stuffing or whatever it is. But you might have this, say, you know what? Well, I want to be a little bit thinner. I want to have some defined abs. I want to. It'd be nice to walk up the stairs without feeling that I need a rest. Something like that. I mean, that's just a silly example, but it could be anything. We have a general idea of the direction we want to go and that to get there, the only thing we have to do is start. So get out of the habit of not waiting, or get in the habit of not waiting and just start. Take some kind of action. I'll give you one more example from my own personal life. So for the last five years, literally, maybe even more than actually, it probably is more than that. I wanted to set up a retirement account for my future. For my retirement, I wanted to start investing money. But it was such a tedious thing for me to do. The idea of putting money in the stock market scared me. And then the idea of trying to manage it and trying to figure it out myself scared me. I felt like it was something that was always going to be beyond my grasp, always something that I was never going to fully understand. And because the industry makes it so it doesn't have to be that complicated, and it isn't that complicated. And I'll tell you where that shift happened in, like, that mental shift that happens. I was reading a book. The book is called Eyes Wide Open. By Isaac Litsky. Highly recommend. It's about. Well, I'm not even. He's blind. And it talks about his experiences of seeing clearly, having lost the sense of sight. In this book, he says that he looks at. He was given the analogy of poker, and he was saying how poker. A lot of people would think that poker is a 50, 50 shot, that it's a very risky. It's a risky game to play if you go to the casino, that the odds are actually stacked in the casino's favor. But that's not true. Through some facts and through this research that someone else had done, what he found was that poker is actually a game of skill. That people who acquired this game of skill for the game, poker, were not like 51% more likely to win. 52%, 60%, 70%, but they were 90% more likely to win in the game. Over many games played, they were 90% more likely to come out ahead. Pretty good odds, aren't they? And what he did was he kind of boomerang this back towards life. See, life is in a way, kind of like that game. Not kind of life is that game of poker. The risk, the chance is that you don't know what kind of hand you're going to be dealt. And that hand could be dealt differently every time. But by knowing how to play the game, by knowing the skills, by knowing the rules, you can increase your chances of success. You can increase your chances of doing better, performing better. And then again, so much of that is mindset. So much. I mean, whether a person has a million dollars in the bank or they have $1 in the bank, you could find people who are happy in both. You could find people miserable in both. So the actual object really doesn't make a difference. What makes a difference is the mindset. And that's the first place we have to put our resources, the first place we have to develop. And that is kind of one of my purposes is to give people perspective on life through my own journey, to help you on your journey. And I've been putting a lot of. A lot of my time and energy and money into developing myself because I want to understand myself. And what are these things that make up the personality? How did they get there? And how can you overcome them? And that's what I'm learning. But again, the habit of not waiting and to close off, you could shift beliefs. Right? Let's go to the beliefs, for example. So beliefs are something that we got through repetition either. Well, not either from the environments that we live in. It Might have been someone telling us we were over and over that we were no good. We would never amount to everything. All of a sudden, we took that on as a belief, or there was something else that happened where we miss. We applied a meaning to an experience of life that was false. So then how do you overcome these beliefs? How do you change a belief that's been set, that's been embedded in you? One way, again, is to do that repetition of doing the exact opposite, Realizing the truth and repeating that over and over. And then that whole visualization process is that you could live any experience without having lived it. I did this when I went skydiving. I was scared shitless to go jump out of a plane. I was afraid of heights prior to that. But I did this visualization process where every night I would see myself jumping out of a plane and being on the ground and celebrating having done it. When I was up in that plane, I felt like a million bucks. I was looking forward with anticipation to get to do the dive. When I got to the edge of that plane, that was a different story. I looked down, realized there was nothing left. There was, but I jumped. So we all have to jump. And what I was getting at was that you could have this. Do these visualization things that will change the mindset over time. It's not something that happens instantaneously because your beliefs have been something that have been conditioned over and over and over again. But. But you can get there through experience. You can get there by having experiences that prove otherwise, that take the belief and crush it and just kind of crinkle it and start to make scratches on that record. Another reason why I like travel, to give you an example, traveling a lot of the time, we have these biases towards different social groups, people of different religions, people of different races. We have these. These biases, these stereotypes that we have. And it might not even be ours. We don't even know how the hell they got there. But we've been taking them in because of society, maybe because of news, blaming people who are Islamic about whatever it may be. We have all these things that come in, and as a result of not questioning those beliefs, we start to take them as true and as taking them as true. Or maybe it's something that was in the culture, like, say, racism, right? Say the racism in the United States about blacks and whites. Even though that has passed and no one. I mean, I'm sure there will be some people, but I do not believe at all that there should be any segregation. I believe that every Single one of us is born equal, doesn't matter. Race, creed, ability, disability, we are all equal. But you tend to get these beliefs that kind of infiltrate your mind. And while you never chose them, they're there. And you might hear them flare up from time to time because they are present in the environment around you. So one of the things that breaks this belief system that gets you out is the experience. So the experience will actually break the belief because you're like, oh, wow, this is the belief I had. You start to see more clearly and you say, this is what I had. And actually this is true. I'll give you two examples. One, I had a friend, my friend Jen, we were talking about. I won't even get into specifics. We met for coffee and she was telling me about this emotional experience she had. And I wanted her to see that she, because of having gone through this, this experience actually made her stronger. And she was going through all these. And I kind of reflected the story back at her. I said, well, I have a friend who went through A, B and C. And she came out with this. What kind of adjectives would you use to describe my friend? She's like, oh, wow, she's very strong. She's very blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and going on. And what she didn't know was that she was actually describing herself. And through that reframe, being able to reflect that back order said, wow, this experience actually made me stronger. It made me more of my true self. It made me grow. Secondly, the experience of trying to. I'm thinking about my own life and how to phrase this, but thinking that it was difficult for me to. We have these beliefs. So for me, it was difficult. It was difficult to do a business or start a business or difficult to make a business successful. When I think about what I've done in my business and actually reflected on it, the hardest part, one of the hardest parts is actually getting started. So I was looking at my business and I said, all right, well, this is the belief I have. Let me kind of break that down. Let me throw it on paper so this way it's not lingering in my head. Let me put it on paper. I put it on paper and I said, okay, I am not doing the business. The reason I'm not progressed is because growing a business hard. Or I might have said that I wasn't smart enough or that I didn't have the ability, that I couldn't make the money. I had these beliefs. So I put them on paper and I said, all right, let me just kind of analyze these and see if they're true. As I was breaking them out and I started questioning them, I realized that they were all really bullshit and that the experience of having gone through that actually gave me the strength, gave me the reference point, gave me the legs of that table to make me stand on and stand firm. So experience alone can help you get past limiting beliefs. That is a rant. I went in a few different directions. Hopefully you caught up to me in the end. But it all starts with mindset. It all starts with the internal game, which becomes external. That is it. Guys, for this session, this was longer than I anticipated. I was actually trying to end it at 10 minutes because I feel like that's an easier bite to digest. But I went over it to now 23. If you enjoyed this, I hope you would share it with your friends, your family, your significant other. And I would love to hear your own questions, your own feedback on what you thought about this episode. You could tag me or email me at Donnie D O N N Y R A U S one word on Instagram. Thank you guys so much. Remember, you get one life. Live it. Thank you very much.