Hack your way to consistency (and reach your goals)

What's going on? Let's talk about being consistent when it's hard to do so. So if you are somebody that feels like you always start really strong, you get a really good head start, you're motivated, you're inspired, and then you hit a wall. And no matter how hard you try, you just can't get yourself to continue doing what you were doing. You burn out, you lose motivation, you lose inspiration. That's fine. That's normal, right? A lot of people do this and then they get into this negative self-talk loop where they're like, oh my God, I'm the problem here. I can't do anything. I can't be consistent with anything at all. I'm never gonna have a good relationship. I'm never gonna have a good job. I'm never gonna be able to start my own business because I'm too inconsistent. Well, I want you to rethink that because one, that's a self-limiting belief. And I think tagging yourself as anything negative, like being inconsistent, is dangerous 'cause you're never gonna be able to surpass that. Whatever you think you are, that's what you're going to be, right? And that's why I've been pretty keen on avoiding certain self-talk with myself 'cause I am quite self-deprecating. And I think that's important for being a down-to-earth guy, but I've never been consistent, and that's okay, right? I have been so inconsistent that it used to be very demoralizing for me because I'd get obsessed with something, and then 3 months later, like, after making it my entire identity, after saying, like, this is who I am, I'd get bored of it and I'd move on, and I used to hate myself for it. But then I just sat down and I removed the emotional ties that I had with those experiences, and I'm like, what does this say about me? And what does this say about the games that I'm playing? And I realized that that was actually my secret sauce. The thing that I hated the most about myself and that caused me the most strife and turmoil is actually the thing that made me special. And it's the thing that I needed to double down on and go deep on because I got obsessed with things and then I learned a bunch about them and then I got bored of them and I moved on. But all of that stuff that I learned and that obsession that drove this intensive research and this intensive learning at such a rapid pace that it's— hardly replicable if someone tried, gave me such a strong skill set that I now have in my back pocket for life. So it gave me a very broad and expansive skill set. And that is why I am a generalist. And that's why I recommend a lot of people to go down this route of pursuing this idea of generalism, right? Society wants you to be a specialist. They want you to be a cog in a machine because, as I mentioned in my last video, that makes you dependable, that makes you predictable, and that makes you reliable, right? And it makes you it makes you dependent on the system as well. But we all want to be Renaissance men. We are hardwired to be very capable and have a lot of skills because that encoded the highest likelihood of us for survival as well as for our small tribe. So that's the thing here is if you are inconsistent, that's fine. Just always find a way to take whatever you learned and say, how can I apply this to my next endeavor, my next venture? Like for my example, you know, I started out in marketing and then I went to cybersecurity and I was like, How am I gonna apply marketing to creating a threat intelligence software? Well, because I was obsessed with marketing beforehand, I got really good at making cool stories. And this was an industry where nobody talked about stories. Everybody talked about stats and features and technical qualities. And my co-founder was a technical guy. My entire team, they were all technical developers and analysts. But I was the one that could make stories. So I took what my previous obsession was and I applied it to my new one, which was building this business. So I did that and then I got burnt out, right? I got burnt out after 2 years too. And that's within that business also doing a thing where I switched it up where one month I was a user experience designer, the next month I was an operations expert, the next month I was focusing on analysis and I was actually doing development. And I always just switched it up, but eventually the macro thing got boring as well. So I moved on. No spilled milk, right? I got rid of this idea of sunk cost and I gave up because I didn't want to give up. A lot of people think if you give up on an opportunity, you give up on a job, you're giving up. No, if you stay with an opportunity, if you stay with a job that no longer serves you, then you're giving up, right? So you gotta give up to not give up. It sounds oxymoronic, but it's true. Anyway, then I did that and I'm like, well, fuck, I just spent 2 years in this very specialized industry. How am I gonna take anything that I learned and apply it elsewhere? And then I thought about it. I'm like, if I just change what the actual product or service was, I learned so much stuff. I learned so much about operations, about building a team, about the legality behind building a team, behind fundraising, behind marketing, behind outreach, behind sales. And I was able to like really just look at it objectively and say, I could apply this to anything I wanted. This is the best thing I could have done. 'Cause I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was 18, let alone 20, you know, any of those years. I still don't really know what I wanna do. I kinda just do whatever. I do what I want and that's what I wanna do. But anyway, I applied that and then I looked at the next opportunity. It's almost like a funnel down, right, where you're just testing, testing, testing, and then you go on to the next thing and you're like, okay, this is closer. It's not the next thing, best thing, but I learned a lot. Let me move on to the next one. You got to do what you want, but you also got to do what works. And I think a lot of people mess up on that too. They start and they think that they're entitled to do what they want. They think that they can just go and be a botanist or go and make flowers and make $100,000 a year. But that's not how it works. The world Value is value, right? The world rewards value. So you need to make yourself— So Good They Can't Ignore You, great book, by the way. But you gotta do what works, and then on the side, do what you want. And then slowly take what's working and align it more and more with what you want. Even if that means not making as much money right away. Even if that means not doing exactly what you wanna do right away, 'cause you're holding out. So then finally, your passion, your purpose, and your profit can all align. But anyway, we're getting sidetracked here, which is fine. I don't really care. I want to talk about how to do stuff consistently, and especially if you are sporadic like I am. If you guys notice from my content, one, it's really lo-fi, and two, it's very broad and expansive. There's so many topics, and I'll talk a bunch about something and then I'll completely move on, and then 3 months later I'll come back to that. That's by design, right? Because I had an agency, a content agency, where we kind of broke down the structure of how to make content. And because I had people working for me and working with me, we had to make it very systematized so people could run it. But you as an individual, like if you're doing an individual pursuit, that may work for you for a little bit, but that's a job. That's not your pursuit. That's a job. You're following a playbook. So when it comes to making content in this context, and when it comes to training, when it comes to nutrition for me, which are things that I do very consistently and I love, my only objective is to enjoy doing it the next day., right? So I remove all of the friction as much as possible because as I mentioned in that earlier example, if I were to write a thread or if I were to make a 20-minute YouTube video with a bunch of editing, it was a pain in the ass and made me wanna kill myself while making it and it flopped, I would be miserable. I would have no motivation to go and make a video like the next day. But when I sit here and I press record on my QuickTime player and then I immediately upload that to YouTube and while it's uploading, I go into Figma, which is a skill I learned when creating software. And I make the shittiest thumbnail ever, I'm posting volume. I don't care how many followers I get. I don't care how many views I get. I just post, post, and post. It is self-serving to me. I don't care if anybody sees this, but that is also the key to success in my personal context is I don't have— I can't care about the outcome. I can only care about enjoying the objective and enjoying the process. So that is a thing there. You gotta remove your obsession with the output. I don't make goals. I never have set goals, and that's what's worked best for me. And also, I purposely don't try very hard because every time I don't try very hard, that's when I have the best success. And I've gone back and I've analyzed this. You need to go back and you need to play archaeologist with your past and you need to analyze areas that you perform really well and areas that you perform poorly and start gathering data and start connecting the dots and saying, wow, like I seem to perform well in X, Y, and Z. I perform really well when I'm just shooting the shit. I perform really well when I don't really care and I don't have anything to lose. And I perform really well when I'm forced to be put on the spot. And that's why I love video content, 'cause I have no other option but to continue talking. When I'm writing, I can go and get up and do whatever I want. But if I fuck up while doing video content, I have to start over, 'cause I'm not editing. I hate editing. Anyway, the moral of the story here is to reinvent these games based on your natural proclivities. And the only way you can do that is by taking deliberate effort to go back and be an observer of your own life and an observer of your own behaviors. You are not yourself, right? We all get caught up in our heads. We have so much emotional charge and emotional energy towards who we are and what we do, and we have these beliefs about ourselves that aren't even true. You gotta remove all of that, and you just gotta look at yourself objectively as if you were somebody else. Talk about yourself in the third person. The old versions of you are no longer you. Those are different people. Those are different versions of you. So just go and look at them as if you were a scientist looking at a lab rat, because all the old versions of you are a lab rat. You are currently a lab rat. And just get a good sense of who you are and what you do and how you operate, and then create games around that. For me, the game has just been frictionless and novelty-seeking. I want things that enable me to do new stuff every single week, every single month, whenever I want to, and I want things that are frictionless, right? Things that I can just do quickly. I constantly remove things that cause any drag in any component of my life, right? With training, with cooking, with business, with content. And that's how I found that I perform best. Now I'm always testing that theory, but it's what works for me. And you guys can do the same and it's gonna suck. I will be honest. Everybody else was just like kind of chilling, getting jobs, you know, doing their thing. I was grinding away at this business, at that startup. And I was just obsessively observing myself to the point where I became incompatible with society. I didn't socialize. I didn't go and hang out. 'Cause I was so in my head because I was just observing myself as if I was somebody else. I purposefully disassociated myself. I purposefully abstracted myself from the present moment, and I just looked at myself like a creature. And I look back on that with— it was initially disdain because I'm like, man, I was such a loser back then. I wasn't a loser, I was a weirdo. But that was the reason that I was able to have this total redevelopment, right? This complete change of who I was as a person. I got off of SSRIs. I overcame this SSRI-induced anhedonia that ruined my life for an extended period of time. I went from being a sloppy frat kid in college to being someone who was actually a really high performer, and then after that being someone who had a life that was really aligned with his objectives and his goals and in touch with himself. Every single thing that I thought I was never going to get over, I got over because I was patient and I just observed and I removed the emotional ties with dealing with your own problems. It's so easy to solve other people's problems, it's very hard to solve your own problems. And the funny thing about that is everybody typically has one big problem that that if they were to solve, their life would go swimmingly, right? It's so self-sabotaging. It's almost always one thing, right? It's gambling, it's alcohol, it's avoidant behavior, right? It's social inconfidence, right? It's some self-consciousness that you have. Now, if you get over it, life's a cakewalk, but it's hard to do, right? Because we just get in our own heads. So anyway, lots to unpack there. Think about this, write this down, apply it to your own life. And your life will be better for it. It's going to take some time though, so be patient. Anyway, godspeed. Subscribe as well, please. How you doing? Peace.