The worst thing you can do in life

Imagine being 80 years old, looking back at your life, and your biggest regret is all the things you never tried.

What would your life look like if you never pursued what you really wanted to do?

Sitting around just thinking of what it would feel like to actually be living the way you've always imagined you could live.

Watching others do things that seem almost insane or impossible, but you see them doing it.

You want to be just like them, and you know you can be.

But you just never take that first step.

You can go out with your friends, but your mind will not fully be there.

You can meet a girl but your mind will still wander off, you just won't be in the present moment enjoying your time with her.

If you have that lingering thought in your mind all the time you know exactly what I'm talking about.

But what if you're in a weird spot in life where you haven't really discovered what that thing is but you have know you feel deep down that this career you've studied to get into for years and have been not finally pursuing and working really just doesn't satisfy you and you feel like there's something else you should be doing with your life rather than the path you're on now?

One way to really get an idea of trying something new in life is to start with things that actually peak your interest.

One thing that we confuse with working and purpose is the act of just attaining money to buy things that we want, but just working for money will make you the most miserable person if you are not working for purpose.

Alan Watts once said:

"Forget the money, because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living—that is, to go on doing things you don't like doing."

If money isn't the thing you should chase, and you don't feel as though you are doing what you are meant to do in life, then how exactly do you know what you should be doing?

When you were younger you were told you had to figure out a major, go to college, get into debt, find a job that seems like you'd want to do your entire life.

This way does work for most people sometimes, but this doesn't work for all people.

You will figure out the hard way that you have been dupped by this expectation and you might believe now that you really are not doing what you want to be doing in life.

But how exactly am I going to figure what I want to do, where do I even start?

I say, you make it physical, you write.

Just take a minute to think about what really interests you, you can narrow it down to 5 things, take a notepad and write it those 5 things down.

Now once you've written those 5 things down, looking over what you have just written, which one brings up the most fear within you?

That's the one you need to go for.

You might be thinking what? How does that make any sense? I have to go for something that scares me? Why would I do that?

The answer is quite simple because the thing you fear reaps the highest payoff.

Just think of it, what happens when you think of climbing Mount Everest? You feel the most fear because it's the highest peak. But how do you feel once you reach the top? The most reward and wisdom you can experience.

The same exact thing applies here, the better than you become at this craft, the more rewards life will give you, and the higher your confidence will rise to do even more fearful things in life as a domino effect.

So now that you understand what it is you want to do, that is when you are met with the most resistance.

And this resistance is something so great that it has kept quite a lot of people back from ever trying to take the first step in achieving their goals.

One of my favorite writers named Steven Pressfield actually felt this same resistance for most of his life.

It got so bad for him he wrote an entire book about it called "The War on Art." which I highly advise you checkout.

For Steven himself, It took him 27 years of trying to break through his resistance to finally write one of his best books, the Legend of Bagger Vance.

Which actually was such an amazing book, that 5 years after it's publication, a director named Robert Redford directed a film based on the story written by Pressfield himself.

This honesty just shows how you can be pushed back for years of creating something you want to put out in the world, but your mind loves to toy with you and tell you, you're not good enough and no one will like your art, but in this example, Steven finally unleashed his Mastery into the world and it caught fire and was a massive success.

Since then, Steven has written 22 books since then and each of them has been a pretty massive success.

However, with the proper tools to battle this fight against resistance, alongside the right mindset, it doesn't have to take you over two decades to finally start doing something that you want to do.

So you might be asking what's the tools I can use to conquer this fear that comes up? What's a good state of mind to have when my mind is telling me I'm not good enough to do something like this?

So now that we are aware of this weird thing called resistance, the next question is what exactly can we do when we feel it?

Do we believe just because I am feeling fear about doing something brand new I shouldn't start it because it is scary?

And to that I say no, because that's not the point of why you feel it.

Once you feel it, you know now that you are on to something so now you must break past it.

This fear that comes up in you is almost like a compass in a sense.

We have to use this compass to figure out what we want to do, we hit that resistance, and now we have to break past it.

So to help you with this process of breaking through that barrier I have 5 methods i've used myself in my life that has drastically helped me not only with creating but really anything that comes up that I know I have to do but really don't want to.

Method 1: Start Small

The first method is to make your initial action ridiculously small that your brain can't come up with an excuse not to do it.

If you want to write a book, don't start by trying to write a chapter. Start by writing a single sentence. (text)

When you make huge goals you can create an overall large goal, the problem is just having one large goal say you want to start a coffee business, just that alone could be overwhelming.

So what you do is you start with a small goal which is deciding what do you want your name to be?

As simple as this is, getting what seems like a very small task done really helps you get the momentum going since you have finally started with something which is actually quite major and will help with all other decisions going forward since you now have a brand you could build from.

From here you can form the next set of decisions around a name and keep the ball rolling, you go from one small goal a day over and over again until once you know it, you've created your own business which at once seemed almost impossible but you now see once you break every large goal into small ones how it is possible.

Method 2: Loving the battle.

If you get yourself enjoying the struggle of creating, you will be unstoppable.

The sooner you can develop a mindset of loving the process even the fear that comes along with it, the easier things will become.

An excellent example of this is going to the gym. Whether you enjoy it or not, you still do it. You put your body under massive loads of stress for a reason, deep down you know you enjoy doing it.

Learning to enjoy the struggle will not only boost your confidence significantly but almost makes everything feel like a fun game of winning.

Method 3: The Countdown

Count down in your head 3,2,1 and you just go and do it.

It's crazy how well this method actually works and a good reason why is when counting, it creates a pattern that interrupts the chatter in your head and stops the mental debate and narrows your focus to something that you want to do, once you hit 1 your mind immediately wants to just go.

If you have ever been in some kind of race, this will feel instinctual. We are trained to take immediate action at GO, the same applies here.

What's really nice about this method is how easy it is for almost everything you don't want to do and know you should, say you know you need to go to the gym so you can keep the consistency up, you count down. 3-2-1 and just go do it.

Method 4: Build a Consequence System

If you are having a hard time keeping yourself on track or accomplishing your goals, use a disiplinary system that forces you to reap consequences from your lack of improvement.

For example, say you're writing a book, say you want to start small and do a chapter a month.

This is a perfect opportunity to put the Consequence System in play, every month that you don't finish a chapter of a book, you have to pay a friend $100.

Say you go an entire year without a single chapter done, then you will owe said friend $10,000 for not producing anything for the entire year.

Our brains are wired to respond more strongly to immediate consequences than future benefits.

As harsh as this can be on your mind sometimes you have to create deadlines like this in a way that forces you to finish a project for yourself.

If you can force yourself to do work for someone else, then you can force yourself to do work for your own self.

Method 5: Just Doing it.

The final method is literally just doing it.

As cliche as this sounds, this is the best way to get something done, you just literally try and do it and once you do, you think to yourself why you were even putting it off to begin with at all.

There are so many artists who have said in length about just doing it.

Not just thinking about it, but doing it.

Steven King once said

"The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better."

Our minds love to trick us into not doing the things we want in life.

We just have to learn when it tries to stop us, and we get scared of trying to do something new we've never done before, but you know in your heart you want to do, just do it, you'll live a life of gratitude and satisfaction, rather than living a regret of what if.

Trust me here, you do not want to live your entire life making up excuses to not become who you were meant to be, i've been in that state of mind personally for too long and everything in life will lose it's meaning and value to you the more you don't do what you truly want in life.

But once you take that step and start doing more than thinking, the better you become at your craft, the more you start to enjoy life, and the more oppurtunities life with present to you.

We have proof that we live in an age where thousands of people can do what they want in life and make a living from it, so there's honestly no excuse for you anymore.

If you want something in life, you can have it, you just have to understand it's possible, try for it, and if the struggle is worth it, keep going, and never give up.

So here's my challenge to you:

What's that one thing you've been putting you off? Write it down, make it physical. Use the advice in this video, start small but start today, because the worst thing you can do in life isn't failing, it's never starting at all.