5 Things You Should NEVER Give People - Even If They Ask | Stoic Mindset

Being a good person does not mean you have to say yes to every favor someone asks of you. So the first thing that you need to know is that you have to be able to say no, and what no means is that you're not going to do it. Well, focusing is, is saying yes— no, focusing is about saying no. True stoicism teaches that your internal assets like time and peace of mind are your most valuable resources, and you must protect them. So to minimize stress and stay productive. You have to learn the gentle art of saying no. God, your creator, did not make you just to be an instrument for other people's relief. If you keep handing over your life to please everyone else, you will wake up 10 years from now completely burned out, empty, and living someone else's dream instead of building your own. When people have been depending on you, they will not appreciate the boundaries. They will not appreciate the no. Your time is limited. So don't waste it living someone else's life. Over 2,000 years ago, the great Stoic philosopher Seneca noticed something crazy about how people act. He saw that people would fight to the death to protect their land and their money, but they would happily let strangers steal their time. He says, look, if your neighbor came over and parked their car on your property, if your neighbor built a shed on your property, you say, what is this? Get off. You can't do this. But if your neighbor wasted an hour of your time, you would let them, which is insane because you can get more property. You cannot get more time. In his famous essay On the Shortness of Life, he wrote that people are frugal with their property, but when it comes to wasting time, they are totally reckless. He realized that your life is not actually short. You just waste a lot of it by handing it over to people who do not care about your— It makes no sense. You can always make another $100, but you can't make another 2 hours that you just wasted on something stupid. Stop handing out your time to everyone and start valuing your time. Realize it's the most important thing you have. Now I know what you're saying right now. You're thinking that setting hard boundaries will make you lose clients and friends and opportunities, but you've got it completely backwards. People don't respect pushovers. They respect people who value their own time. Setting limits doesn't push the right people away. It actually filters out the users and the manipulators. If you wanna know exactly what you should never hand over to anyone else, You need to learn these 5 rules. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. Your time without limits. You can lose your entire business today and you can build it back tomorrow. You can lose $100,000 in a bad deal and you can figure out a way to make $200,000 next year. But you can never get back the 5 hours you wasted yesterday. Time is the only resource you possess that is strictly non-renewable, yet you probably treat it like it's infinite. You let people interrupt your deep work just because they ask politely. You take random phone calls that are not on your schedule. You agree to coffee meetings that have absolutely no clear agenda just because you want to be seen as a nice person. Every single time you do this, you are silently destroying your own potential. People lose control of their lives, not because they make one massive catastrophic mistake. They lose control because they let their time slip away in 1,000 tiny, unnoticeable ways. A 10-minute chat here, a small favor there, a quick text response that breaks your focus. It all adds up to a mountain of wasted potential. According to a study by the American Psychological Association, constantly shifting between tasks and dealing with interruptions can cost you up to 40% of your productive time. So let's think about what that means for your business. You are literally burning almost half of your working hours just because you refuse to say no to people. When I was 19, I was part of a biotech software company. I was grinding every single day trying to be everything to everyone. I took every meeting and I answered every email immediately. I thought that was what hustle looked like, but I ended up completely burned out and actually quit on my business partner. I felt entirely isolated and alone. I had to learn the hard way that giving away unlimited access to my time did not make me more successful. It just left me empty and exhausted. You have to build an invisible wall around your schedule. If someone asks you for a piece of your day, they need to earn it. You are not a public park where anyone can just wander in and set up a picnic, right? You are a private fortress. You must guard your working hours with intense jealousy. Stop letting the outside world dictate your daily agenda. Your inner peace and emotional control. So the ancient Greeks, they had a specific word for the ultimate state of mental calm. They called it ataraxia. It translates to being completely unbothered and free from emotional disturbances. It doesn't mean that you have a tensionless life and no problems. It means that you have bulletproof calm while the problems are happening around you. It is the ability to walk through a storm and stay entirely level-headed without letting the chaos outside get inside your head. But right now you're handing your ataraxia over people who do not deserve it. You let a rude comment from a stranger ruin your entire morning. You let a complaining client dictate your mood for the rest of the day. You invite toxic people into your physical and mental space, and then you wonder why you feel so drained. There are specific types of people you must absolutely refuse to give your emotional control to: the constant complainer, the gossip, the energy drainer. When you react emotionally to these people, you are handing them the steering wheel to your life. The Stoics believe that your mind becomes shaped by what you expose it to. So if you sit there and listen to someone complain for 20 minutes, their negativity becomes your negativity. So you must practice emotional detachment. When someone tries to upset you or pushes your buttons, you pause, you take a breath, picture their words just bouncing right off you. You do not have to join their drama. You do not have to match their negative energy. The less you react, the less power they hold over you. You have to realize that keeping your peace of mind requires you to make logical choices, not emotional ones. If someone constantly brings instability into your life, you must limit your exposure to them immediately. Protecting your mental space— it's not selfish, it's the smartest business decision that you can make. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in description, go grab it. I'll see you there. Your self-respect and need for validation. So one of the most dangerous things you can give someone is the power to validate your worth. In today's world, it's incredibly easy to base your self-esteem on external metrics. You look at how many likes you get, how much praise your boss gives you, or what your family thinks of your new business idea. The moment you rely on other people to validate your choices, you become a prisoner to their opinion. So Marcus Aurelius wrote something brilliant about this in his journal. He said, "It never ceases to amaze me. We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own." Think about how crazy that is. You know your dreams better than anyone else, right? You know your work ethic, you know what you are trying to build, yet you will let a passing comment from someone who is not even trying to build a business, stop you in your tracks. When you seek validation from the outside world, you create a pretty fragile dependency. Opinions change constantly. People will misunderstand you. People will project their insecurities onto you. If your self-respect is tied to their approval, your confidence will collapse the second they stop clapping for you. So when I started my YouTube channel, I was pretty bad on camera. I was pretty terrible. I was a massive introvert. It took me 5 years to hit 2,000 subscribers. That is a painfully long time to work on something without getting massive external validation. I made 350 public videos before I stopped being completely embarrassed by my own content. I made 700 videos before I actually watched one and felt inspired by my own work. Or if I had waited for the world to validate me, I would have quit in the first month. I had to anchor my confidence in my own effort, not in the view counts of the videos. So you have to anchor your self-respect in your own virtues and your own actions. Are you showing up every day? Are you putting in the work every day? Are you treating other people with respect? If the answer is yes, then you do not need anyone else to validate you. Stop negotiating your own self-worth. Stop performing for an audience that does not truly care about your long-term success. Your power of choice. There's a concept in Stoic philosophy called proairesis. It refers to your rational mind and your fundamental capacity to make choices. It's the core of human freedom. You cannot control the economy, you cannot control the algorithm, and you certainly cannot control what other people do. But you always retain the absolute power to choose your response. The problem is you give this power away constantly. You let guilt, social pressure, and fear make your choices for you. So, uh, when a client demands that you lower your prices and you agree just because you're afraid of losing them, you are surrendering your pro-heresis. When a family member pressures you to take a safe job instead of building your startup and you give in to keep the peace, you are surrendering your power of choice. So you need to draw a line in the sand. Your ability to decide the direction of your life is not up for negotiation. People will always try to bargain with your dignity and your direction. They will try to make you feel bad for having high standards. They will call you stubborn or difficult just because you refuse to conform to their expectations. Let them call you whatever they want. A study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who feel a strong sense of autonomy and control over their choices experience significantly higher levels of long-term well-being and success. So you have to act like you are the CEO of your own life. Every time you say yes to something that you hate, you are betraying yourself. You are telling your own brain that your preferences do not matter. So start practicing the word no. Say it firmly and do not offer a massive apology or a long explanation. You do not owe anyone an explanation for protecting your own life path. When you can reclaim your power of choice, you stop being that passenger in your business and you finally take the wheel. Your ultimate life purpose. The final thing you must never give away is your life purpose. Your purpose is the anchor that decides the quality of your entire existence. If you do not have a clear purpose, your accomplishments will always feel completely empty. You will end up working 80 hours a week to build a massive company, only to realize you hate the industry that you're in. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself daily to stay focused. He wrote, get busy with life's purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue if you care for yourself at all, and you do it while you can. Too many entrepreneurs let the market dictate their purpose. They chase whatever trend is hot right now, or they build the business model entirely based on what some guru told them to do. You have to figure out what you are actually meant to do. I deeply believe that your purpose comes directly from your pain. So the things that you struggled with the most in your past are the exact things you are uniquely qualified to help other people overcome. So I struggled with a lack of belief. I did not believe in myself enough when I was a young entrepreneur. So now my entire life is dedicated to solving the world's biggest problem, which I believe is that people do not believe in themselves enough. I don't let anyone pull me away from that mission. And you must find your core mission and guard it fiercely. Do not water it down. Do not make it more digestible for the masses. Do not abandon it just because the path gets difficult, right? You were built to serve. You have a message and a gift that the world desperately needs. But if you let other people distract you, manipulate you, steal your focus, you will never deliver that gift. Refuse to hand over your purpose to the chaos of the outside world. Protecting these 5 things will completely change your trajectory. But there is one final mental shift you must make today if you want to ensure you never fall back into the trap of pleasing everyone else. The ultimate shift. You have to accept that greatness requires you to be misunderstood by average people. Stop apologizing for having standards that demand your full focus. Protect your mind, right? Guard your time and ruthlessly defend your purpose against any distraction. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn why success is hard until you build systems like this. You do not lack discipline. You just have a terrible daily environment. They say we're creatures of our environment. You believe that, Post? Yes, I am a creature of my environment. You're the boss in your apartment, right? No matter what, no matter how little it is, if it's a— whether it's a big house or a little house, that space right there, you're the boss. That's what your business is. That's what your life is. You create the space so you can control it. You control your environment, but you have to architect that. The space you choose to work in can seriously impact your productivity and your mood. Structuring your surroundings to make good choices automatic is the real secret behind every millionaire that you admire. You don't have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it. Your brain is a record of your environment. Who you surround yourself matters. What content you consume matters. If you keep fighting against a broken routine, you stay stuck exactly where you are for the next 10 years. Growth requires deliberate habits. If you don't know your routines, how are you supposed to ever feel your best? No one can live without a routine. You just forget that. If you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend, like, you get one going. In 2006, doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to improve the eating habits of thousands of staff members and visitors. They did not talk to anyone about willpower or motivation. They simply changed the physical environment. They added bottled water to every single refrigerator right next to the soda. Within 6 months, soda sales dropped and water sales skyrocketed. They proved that you often choose things not because of what they are, but simply because of where they are in your environment. Now, I can hear your doubts right now. You might be telling yourself that you've tried routines, you've bought the planners, and you always fall off track after a couple days. But your systems did not fail because you are weak. They failed because you designed them for the perfect version of yourself, not the tired and stressed-out version of yourself. When you build a system based on your actual reality, it does the heavy lifting for you. Let me show you how to structure your day so that success becomes completely automatic. Stop chasing goals and start building a daily machine. Goals are completely useless for changing your daily behavior. You have probably set massive goals for your business before. You wrote them down. You felt a huge rush of motivation. And you pictured how amazing your life was going to be. But a goal only tells you where you want to go. It does absolutely nothing to help you take the physical steps to get there. When you only focus on the goal, you put yourself in a constant state of failure. You wake up every single day realizing that you are still not a millionaire. You still do not have a massive audience and you are still struggling. And that gap between where you are and where you want to be creates massive anxiety for people. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world do not focus just on their goals. They focus on their systems. A system is just a repeatable process that guarantees you take action regardless of how you feel. There's a fascinating study from the British Journal of Health Psychology that showed how people build new habits. Researchers divided people into different groups to see who would stick to a workout routine. One group was just told to track their workouts. Another group was given motivational speeches to boost their desire to exercise. The final group was told to create a specific system. They had to write down the exact day, time, and location that they would work out. The results were pretty shocking. The motivation group only had a 35% success rate, but the group that built a simple system had a 91% success rate. You do not need more motivation to build your business. You just need to decide exactly when and where you are going to do the work. So when I started my YouTube channel, I didn't have a goal to reach 4 million subscribers. If I had focused on that massive number, I would have quit in the first month. Instead, I built a system. My system was simply to create and upload a new video every single week at the beginning. Now we do every day. My first videos were terrible. I was awkward and shy and completely embarrassed to watch myself on camera. But my purpose comes from my pain. I struggled so much when I was starting my first software company. I wanted to quit. I felt totally isolated and alone, and I knew there are other entrepreneurs out there feeling the exact same pain. I wanted to help them. I wanted to help you. So I stuck to my system. I made 350 videos before I was finally not embarrassed by my own content. I made 700 videos before I actually inspired myself. I did not win because I had better goals than anyone else. I won because my system forced me to put in the reps when nobody else was watching. If you want to finally break free from the cycle of starting and stopping, you must build a system that tells you exactly what to do every single morning. Your system will build your momentum. Once you have momentum, becoming successful is just a matter of time. That leads me directly into the next system you need to build. Design your environment for the lazy version of you. You always try to design your life for the perfect version of yourself. You assume you will wake up full of energy, ready to crush your tasks and completely immune to distractions. But that perfect version of you is not real. You need to design your systems for the tired, stressed, and lazy version of yourself. When you are exhausted, your brain will always choose the path of least resistance. If your guitar is in a closet, you will never practice. If your camera is packed away in a bag, you will never record a video. If you have to search for your client list, you will never make your sales call. You have to remove all the friction between you and the work. I want to share a powerful concept from an IT developer named Oswald Knuckles. He created a daily system called resetting the room. Whenever he finished watching television, he does not just turn it off, he puts the remote back on the stand. Fixes the pillows and folds the blanket. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the water is warming up. He does not view this as cleaning. He views this as preparing the room for his next action. He intentionally designs his environment so that his future choices are as easy as possible. You must apply this exact same system to your business. When you finish working for the day, clear your desk, open the exact software you need for the next morning. Leave your notes right next to your keyboard. When you sit down the next day, you will not have to think about what to do. The work will already be waiting for you. This is also how you protect your mindset. Lack of belief is the biggest problem in the world right now. It's what I believe. Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. If you want to change your life, you have to radically change what you feed into your mind. Set up your environment so that success and belief are impossible to ignore. So every single morning I have a system where the very first thing I do is play a video of someone who inspires me. I call it my believe walk. Get up, go outside for at least 15 minutes, put on something that inspires you. I listen to Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Les Brown. I do not leave my inspiration up to chance. I manufacture my belief by designing an environment that forces me to think bigger. Your environment will always beat your willpower in the long run. So fix your surroundings today and your habits will automatically fix themselves tomorrow. But fixing your physical environment is only the first step. Now you have to clear out the mental clutter. The 10 Minute Mental Cleanse System. You are probably carrying hundreds of uncompleted tasks in your head right now. You are thinking about the emails you need to send, the videos you need to film, the clients that you need to get on and call, the bills you need to pay. This creates a massive amount of mental static and stress. When your brain is overloaded with things that are not finished, you literally cannot focus on the task that's right in front of you. This is a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect. In the 1920s, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters in a restaurant could remember complex unpaid orders with perfect accuracy, but the exact moment the bill was paid, the waiters completely forgot the order. Your brain is programmed to constantly remind you of unfinished tasks until you either complete them or put them into a trusted system. To stop this mental drain, you need to build a mental cleanse system. Take 10 minutes every single evening to write down every single thought, idea, and obligation floating around in your head. Do not organize them yet. Just get them out of your brain and onto a piece of paper. This simple act tells your brain that the information is safe. Your brain will finally stop reminding you about these tasks and your anxiety will disappear. Once everything is written down, pick the one most important task that will actually move your business forward. Circle it. That becomes your only focus for the next morning. Everything else can wait. Now, you're probably an overthinker. You get these bold, powerful, and courageous ideas, but instead of acting on them, you sit and think. You analyze the risks, you worry about what people will say, and you let the idea die. You have to trust that great ideas flow through you for a reason. When you get a great idea, you must take one small physical step towards it within 5 minutes. Buy the domain name, record a rough voice memo, send an email to a potential partner. Lock the idea into reality before your mind can talk you out of it. When you stop storing your ideas in your head and start putting them into the physical world, your entire business will transform. But even the best productivity system will fail if you do not have the right foundation. This brings me to the most important system of all. Build a system that forces you to serve others. If your only goal is to make money, you will quit as soon as a process gets painful. Entrepreneurship is incredibly hard. You will face rejection, you will lose money, and you will have days where you want to shut everything down. In those dark moments, wanting a bigger bank account will not give you the strength to keep going. You are built to serve. You want to wake up every single day and feel like your life actually matters to somebody else. When you make your business about helping other people, you tap into this unlimited source of energy. Researchers at the Wharton School of Business conducted a fascinating study on university call center employees. These employees were tasked with calling alumni to ask for donations. The job was highly stressful and had a huge turnover rate. The researchers brought in a student who had received a scholarship funded by those exact donations. The students simply talked to the employees for 5 minutes about how the scholarship had changed his life. Over the next month, the employees who met the student increased their total revenue by 171%. They did not get better scripts. They did not get better training. They simply realized that their work was actually changing a human life. Money is incredibly important. You need money to hire a team, scale your impact, and take care of your family. Money can absolutely be in your top 5 priorities. I think it actually has to be. It just can't be number 1. Your number 1 priority must be the mission. You must have a cause that you would fight for even if you were not getting paid. You need to systemize your service. Make it a mandatory part of your daily system to help one person with zero expectation of getting anything in return. Answer a question in a forum, leave a detailed comment on a small creator's video, or send an encouraging message to a client or a friend. When you focus intensely on who you are serving, your fear of failure goes away. You stop worrying about looking perfect on camera because you realize the message is more important than your ego. Your business will explode the moment you realize that your true job is just to pull other people out of the same dark hole you used to be in. But even the best mindset will fail if you give up too early. Track your actions and ignore your results. Your obsession with immediate results is destroying your long-term potential. So you start a new routine, you work incredibly hard for 2 weeks, and then you turn around and realize nothing has changed. You still do not have the sales, you still do not have the audience, and your bank account looks exactly the same. So you decide the system is broken and you quit. But the system is not broken. You are just expecting to see the harvest while you are still planting the seeds. So in the science of continuous improvement, there is a concept known as the plateau of latent potential. When you first build a new system, your results will flatline for a long period of time. You will put in massive amounts of effort and see absolutely zero external reward. This is where 99% of people give up. but your effort is not being wasted. Your effort is being stored. When I first started my journey, I tracked my year-over-year growth. After 5 years of making content consistently, I only had a few thousand subscribers. Most people would look at those numbers and call me a complete failure. If I had judged my success purely by those results, I would have quit like a thousand times over. But I did not track my results. I tracked my actions. I focused entirely on the fact that I showed up and I did the work. I I promised myself that I would do. You have to love the process of building your business. If you only love the reward, you will never survive the years of grinding in the dark. You must be completely stubborn about why you were doing this, but incredibly flexible about how you get there. Build a system where your only definition of a successful day is whether or not you executed your daily habits. When you stop obsessing over the outcome and start obsessing over the daily inputs your success becomes absolutely inevitable. Your ultimate engine. You already have everything inside you to do something truly legendary. You just have to stop waiting for permission and start building the routines that guarantee your victory. Trust that your ideas matter and take immediate action on them today. I believe in you. I know you can build the life you dream about. Now let's learn the fisherman and business The Businessman Parable. Retiring early is a completely broken goal that is secretly destroying your daily drive. When it comes to retirement, some people have a vastly different experience than the one you might imagine, filled with lazy days of sleeping in and no responsibilities. And for many, this major life shift may trigger some possible mental health issues. Working is not just about money. People don't understand this very often. Until they stop working. Work defines who you are. It provides a place where you're social with people. It gives you interaction with people all day long in an interesting way. It even helps you live longer and is very, very good for brain health. People are trying to wind down and figure out how they're going to slow it down or wrap it up. Fuck wrapping it up, man. Start it up. If you're working this hard just to escape escape your work, it means you have built a business or you have a job that you fundamentally hate. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing, and it's totally true. And the reason is because it's so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. How can other people tap dance to work? What's the secret of that? You find your passion. What I tend to try to tell people in terms of what does it take to be successful— find something you love to do and then great at it. If you don't pivot and build a lifestyle you actually want to live today, you will wake up in 10 years exhausted, sick, and full of bitter regret. Sometimes it's, whoop, need to pivot, need to change the old aperture, change lenses on the way I'm looking at this position. When I'm 80, now 90, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. And most of our regrets are acts of omission. There are things we didn't try. It's the path untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us. You're haunted by all the opportunities that you missed by not bringing your best at that time when you could have won, but you didn't win because you allowed life to interfere with that one shot. There is a famous parable about a businessman who was walking on the pier of a small coastal village. He saw a local fisherman dock a small boat with just a few fish. The businessman asked why he did not stay out longer to catch more. The fisherman said he had enough to feed his family. The businessman asked what he did with the rest of his day. The fisherman smiled and said he sleeps late, plays with his kids, takes a nap with his wife, and plays guitar with his friends at night. The businessman laughed and said, "I have an MBA and I can help you. You should work harder, buy a fleet of boats, Open your own factory and make millions. The fisherman asked how long that would take. The businessman said, maybe 20 years. The fisherman asked what would happen next. The businessman said, then you can retire, move to a small village, sleep late, play with your kids, and play guitar with your friends. The fisherman just looked at him and said, that's exactly what I'm doing right now. Now you might be thinking that you don't want to just sit on a beach all day. You have big goals. You want to make an impact and you actually like building your business. I do too. You don't have to give up your ambition to find peace. The point of the story is not to stop working. The point is to stop building a business that destroys your life today for a promised reward 20 years from now. You can have the success and the lifestyle right now, and I'm gonna show you exactly how to do it. Define your actual enough. So you've been told your entire life that the ultimate goal of an entrepreneur is to build the biggest business possible. You start a company, you hit your first revenue goal, and what is the very first thing you do? You immediately set a larger goal, right? You hit $10,000 a month and suddenly you feel like a failure because you are not making $20,000. You cross $1 million a year and instantly you feel behind because you do not have a $10 million empire. This is running on an endless treadmill. The businessman in the story wanted the fisherman to scale his operations, to buy a fleet of boats, to open up a factory. But he had absolutely no real reason for the fisherman to do it. Other than the fact that society says bigger is always better? Do you actually have a real reason for wanting a massive business? You need to figure out what your actual financial enough is. Science proves that chasing money for the sake of money will never make you happy. There was a famous study that was conducted by researchers at Purdue University that looked at data from over 1 million people across the globe. They found that emotional well-being and daily happiness actually peak at an income of about $75,000 a year. Making more money beyond that point does not significantly increase your daily joy, your peace, or your happiness. It often just brings more stress, more overhead, and more problems. Mo' money, mo' problems. You need to sit down today and calculate exactly what your ideal life costs. Write down the cost of your house, your food, your hobbies, the experiences that you want to have with your family, you will probably realize that you need far less money than you think to live the peaceful life that the fisherman was already living. So figure out what your number is. Stop chasing some fake standard of success that leaves you completely exhausted. Once you know your number, you can finally stop putting off your life until tomorrow. Stop waiting for permission to live. The absolute biggest trap that the businessman presented was the idea of someday. He told the fisherman to suffer for 20 years so that someday he could finally relax. And chances are you're probably doing the same thing to yourself right now. You're telling yourself that you will finally take a vacation when the business hits a certain milestone, right? You tell yourself that you'll finally spend time with your kids when the operations are perfectly systemized, right? You're delaying your actual life or future that is completely unguaranteed. You have to stop waiting for permission to live. You need to apply the regret minimization framework that's famously used by Jeff Bezos. The concept is incredibly simple. You just imagine yourself, uh, as an 80-year-old sitting in a rocking chair looking back on your life. You ask yourself, what will I regret more? Will I regret taking a risk to live the life I want right now, or will I regret playing it safe and waiting for someday? When I was 19, I used this exact framework. I was studying finance in university I had the opportunity to go work for one of the biggest investment banking companies in the world. I thought it was my dream job. It was a 6-figure job straight out of university. It was safe, it was secure. It was exactly what society told me I should want. But I had another option. I could join 2 friends in a software startup. I would get 30% equity, but I'd only make $300 a month at the start. And it was the hardest decision of my life. I had to look at myself and ask what my older self would regret. I knew that if I did not try to build a business, I would regret it forever. I would rather fail knowing I had tried than spend the rest of my life wondering what could have happened. So I turned down the safe money and I chose the startup. And it was terrifying, and there were times that I wanted to quit, but it was the defining choice of my life. You have to make the same choice. Stop waiting for the perfect time. Take the action today to build the life you actually want to live. Find your true purpose in your deepest pain. You might be sitting there thinking that you don't even know what kind of business to build that would allow you to feel free. You want to escape the corporate grind, but you don't know what your real mission even is. The answer is usually hiding in your own past. Your true purpose comes directly from your deepest pain. Whatever you struggled with the most in your life is the exact thing that you are meant to help other people overcome. So, uh, If you struggled with your weight and finally figured out how to get healthy, your mission is to help others do the same thing. If you struggled with massive debt and finally crawled your way out to financial freedom, your mission is to teach others your frameworks. When I was starting my journey, I struggled heavily with being an introverted, shy entrepreneur. I had zero confidence and zero belief in myself because I felt that intense pain. My entire life mission is now to help other entrepreneurs believe in themselves more. It's why I make these videos. When your business is tied to solving a pain that you deeply understand, it completely changes how you show up. It stops feeling like a stressful grind and starts feeling like it's your— it's your calling, that it's calling to you to act. You stop building a business just to make a quick dollar, and you start building something that actually matters to you and to others. And having this deep purpose is not just— it's not just good for your business, it's literally physically good for you. A major study published in the JAMA Network Open found that having a strong purpose is directly associated with a decreased risk of early mortality. So people who have a reason to wake up in the morning literally live longer, healthier lives. So do not build a massive, soulless fishing fleet just because a businessman told you it was a good idea. Build a business that solves a real problem for the younger version of yourself. And when you find that calling, you have to make sure that you do not lose sight of what actually matters. Focus on who you are serving today. The businessman in the story was obsessed with the global market. He wanted the fishermen to sell to middlemen, open a cannery, move to the big city and dominate the world. The businessman was completely focused on all the millions of strangers the fishermen was not currently reaching. But the fisherman, he was completely content focusing on his family, his friends, and his local village. He focused only on the people right in front of him. And this can be a massive lesson for your business. When you are trying to grow, it's incredibly easy to get obsessed with the audience that you do not have. You stare at your analytics, you complain about your lack of followers, you get frustrated that you're not famous yet. You forget about the actual humans who are already showing up for you and watching your content right now or buying your products right now. When I first started my YouTube channel, it was a very slow and painful grind. In my first year on the platform, I only gained 25 subscribers. My very first video sat on the internet for a year and got only 3 comments. One comment was from my mom, one was from my sister, and the third comment was from one random guy. Most people would look at those numbers and quit. Right? They'd say the market is too small, nobody cares. But you have to focus on who you are serving, not who you are not serving. So I decided to make my videos for that one random guy. If my content helped him believe in himself a little bit more, then the video was a success. You can adopt that same exact mindset. If you have 10 clients, treat them like absolute royalty. Stop ignoring the people who support you today just because you are distracted by the thousands of people who do not know you yet. If you serve the few people in front of you deeply, the growth will happen naturally. But as that growth happens, you have to protect your schedule. Break the hustle prison to buy back your time. Now, you might already have a business that is completely running you into the ground. You want the fisherman's lifestyle, but you feel trapped inside the businessman's reality. You're working 80 hours a week. You answer emails at midnight. You can't even remember the last time you took a nap or played the guitar. To get your freedom back, you must ruthlessly apply a 3-step framework. You must eliminate, automate, delegate. First, you must eliminate. So here you look at your calendar and you audit every single task. You are probably doing things that bring absolute zero value to your life or to your clients. You are attending useless meetings. You are doomscrolling on social media, and you're creating reports that nobody reads. Right? Stop doing them immediately. Second, you automate. So you have to use software and systems to take over repetitive tasks. Stop manually sending onboarding emails, stop manually booking appointments, and let technology do a lot of the heavy lifting. And then third, and maybe most importantly, is you delegate. You have to stop trying to be a control freak. You are holding your business back because you insist on doing everything yourself. You should not be editing your own videos. You should not be doing your own booking. Bookkeeping or designing your own graphics if you are not the best in the world at those skills or want to learn them. I'm terrible at video editing, so I don't edit my own videos. I hire people who love doing the work that I hate. If you don't learn to let go, you will destroy your physical and mental health. There was a comprehensive study by Gallup on employee and founder burnout that found unimaginable workloads and unreasonable time pressure are the leading causes of severe burnout. You are doing this to yourself. You have to fire yourself from the jobs you hate within your own company. That is the only way you buy back your time. That is how you build a real business that actually gives you the freedom to sleep late if you want to, spend time with your family and enjoy your life today. Build a life you love today. You have the complete power to design a business that serves your life right now. Stop delaying your joy for tomorrow that is not guaranteed. You can have massive ambition and daily peace at the exact same time. If you want to crush your procrastination, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. You keep breaking promises to yourself when you say tomorrow and actually mean not today. A recent study published in Psychology and Health found that 65% of daily actions are driven by habits, not conscious choices.