Larry Weidel argues that drifting through life without deliberate action leads to stagnation and death. He uses examples from babies to injured people to show how movement, even small steps, creates improvement and opportunity. The message: recognize the danger of passivity and take action now.
I don't think most people realize the danger of just drifting along in life. You got things you want to do, kind of excited about it, important to you, but then you're not doing anything about it. One thing is you got to get scared of drifting. You gotta, you gotta get going. Because the thing is, it's like this drifting, you know, like the worst thing you can do with your health is sit, sit, you know, because you, the body's not, you know, we're, we're bodies. We got bloods that circulate and so you got to move. I just put, put out a video about it. You got to move. And we're, we're set up for movement. The planets move, people move, you're supposed to. Baby is born, it starts kicking and moving. It doesn't have any dexterity or whatever, but it's working. Whatever, you know, whatever it has to move, that baby is moving it. And you find that even with handicapped people, you know, they, they don't want to be called handicapped because whatever resource they have, they're using that and they figure out ways of getting things done. And it's really funny to see babies, you know, get on the Instagram or YouTube or something sometime and watch these things they have of how babies have figured out how to crawl. They've got. All they could do is crawl or scoot. There's about hundreds of different ways they figured out until they could get where they can walk or even crawl. They could scoot, you know, on their stomach with their arms, kind of like turtles. But, you know, figure it out. Move, move, move, move, move. Because moving, any kind of half butted move you do today will lead to greater, more exquisite, refined movement tomorrow. But even if you're, you know, like if you're on the Himalayas and you start to free, you're, you know, you're in a situation where you're, they've got you out of an avalanche, you're freezing to death. What are they going to do? Say, you know, they're going to try and move. You move, you stay awake, stay awake. Don't sleep. Fight the sleep. Don't drift off. Do not drift. And you know, you slap it. You know, like the same thing with the EMTs. Get someone and they've had an injury or something like that. What are they saying to them? Don't follow it. Don't sleep. Don't sleep, don't sleep. Get them if you can, get them up, move them around. The same thing with horses. I mean, when horses are injured, you know, when we were training horses. You wanted to move those horses around. They couldn't lay in the stuff they laid in the stall. They were dead. They're not going to get up, you know, they can't. You got to get them up, you know, at least get them up. And if they can walk, walk, if they could take six steps, take six steps as quick, as many times as you can. But the thing is, you can't drift in life. We're not. Drifting is D is drifting goes straight to death. Drifting is doom. We got to be afraid to drift in life. You got goals, you got abilities, this, that, and the other. You can't drift on this. You can't be passive. We're only here for a short period of time. The clock is ticking that, you know, the sands of time are going out all the time. So the thing is, don't drift. Be afraid of drifting and motivate people, too. You know, people that are around you, you know, when they're starting to give up, you know, that's the thing is I can remember when I was going through a depressing time in my early career, and I had young kids to support and a wife that didn't work outside the home. We didn't have money in the business, you know, seemed kind of hopeless. And I remembered, you know, it was like, you know, I could feel myself falling into, you know, I. I sensed it, you know, falling into a depression. It was like pulling me down. And I got a phone. Fortunately, I got a phone call right at that time from the guy I worked with, Bob Turley. He said, what are you doing to quit? Get your butt in here, you know, boom. You know, whatever he said, it was like, get moving. Come on, where are you? You know, why aren't you in the office? And, you know, he slapped me because I. I needed that, you know, and sometimes that's what people need. And so we, as much as we can, we've got to, you know, we've got a fear. Drifting, you see people starting to drift the first. It's great to teach them, give them a college education, send them to Harvard, you know, whatever, get your masters, wherever. The first thing is get a moving, you know, get moving all. None of that other stuff, you know. And if you're moving, it doesn't matter if you've got the Harvard degree or you've got all the contacts or you got money in the bank or you got this. You got to be moving with it. You got to be doing something with it. So anyway, the danger of drifting is a very Very real thing. So of all the things you do, you know, should I be doing this? Should I be doing. Yes, all of those things are great because either it's going to turn into some success, develop a skill, develop contact, or it's going to let you know that's not the way to go. And another door will open up. You know, like Quentin Tarantino was. I just listened to a video with him, and he was, you know, he drifted away most of his 20s and working up in San Francisco in the Bay Area and the video store was easy. He was around the movie business. He wasn't making movies. But he, you know, he said to himself, you know, I'm around it, I get to talk about him all day long. And then, you know, a series of events you might look Forward on the YouTube happened. One of his friends went over 30 years old and started realizing he was wasting his life. And he had kind of a, you know, a serious talk with Quentin about, you know, what he was going through. And Quentin realized, wait a minute, you know, I'm wasting my life. This is not what I want to do. And what I want to do is make movies. I can't do it in San Francisco. You know, I got to get down to la. And he said, I couldn't afford to move it down to Hollywood, which is where I want to go, but I could go to. I could get into Koreatown. So he went down and he said, I got there and he said I was looking for how I can get in the movie business. And he said, before long, within a day, I met a guy in the movie business. That guy introduced me some other guys in the movie business. We talk movies all the time. And then I met more and more people in it. He said, within a year, a little over a year, he was supporting himself. He was supporting himself writing scripts for, you know, movies, commercials, things like that. But, you know, he had to move himself. He had to get moving. He, you know, he had to have a talking with himself and make changes. And with him, it was a relocation geographically to where that kind of action was happening. But, you know, would have never happened. There would never been a Quentin Tarantino if he had not moved down to LA and got himself in position. That's why so many people in the music business moved to Nashville and other, you know, Austin, other hotbeds of music. So, anyway, be afraid of drifting. Don't drift. The misery will only intensify, will only increase. You don't solve any problems by drifting. You can rest, you can relax. You say okay. I'm gonna take a break and. But then, you know, take a nap and then wake up and get going. Get going as fast as possible. Do not drift.
