Coding Dojo is a programming school that turns beginners into developers in only 14 weeks.
If you're serious about landing a career in tech but lack the formal education or background,
Coding Dojo will get you there in no time.
With over 3000 graduates to date, over 90% of their grads land jobs within three months
of graduating, often making over 70k per year at tech firms of all sizes from companies
like Google to local startups.
To learn more, visit codingdojo.com or click the link in the description below.
Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I was trying to figure out what kind of video to make today.
I've got a bunch of questions on my Trello board.
I had a bunch of video ideas.
I just didn’t feel like doing any of those videos.
I think part of the reason why is just because I'm not being 100% honest with where I'm at
right now.
When I'm not doing that, I'm not being genuine.
It's hard for me to genuine in anything that I'm doing, so this is sort of one of those
honesty videos where I'm going to kind of talk about some hard shit.
I want to talk about a topic that I think would probably benefit a lot of you because
we all tend to have this tendency, which is self-destruction.
You might think someone like me doesn’t have a self-destructive tendency, but I guarantee
you that we all do at times.
We all try to destroy ourselves and destroy what we created and I don’t know.
I don’t know why we do this, but I recently got back from travel and started to get back
into my routine and everything, and I was having a really hard time doing it.
I'm still having a really hard time doing it.
I'm just not feeling very motivated and I'm noticing that—I kind of notice myself doing
things that were destructive, like trying to destroy the relationships that I have,
trying to destroy my fitness and my health that I've worked so hard to build.
Even to some degree, today and for last week, it was sort of like, "Ah, I don’t really
feel like doing YouTube videos anymore and maybe I shouldn’t do YouTube videos anymore.
I don’t have anything good to say," right?
I was just feeling that way.
I was looking at some of my old videos.
I'm like, "Oh, man.
I used to give it.
I used to give the fire, but now it's like, "What am I doing?"
Sometimes I'm just sitting there stuttering in front of the camera and just trying to
make up some shit.
That's how I honestly felt.
I've talked about this before, but this is one of the struggles of being creator.
Even in the business, I was thinking.
"Oh, do I really want to do Simple Programmer?
Do I want to walk away from this?"
You know, I go through these phases at times, but I found myself like really trying to destroy
myself and I wonder why, like why would I do that, what would possess me to do that,
and I don’t have a really good answer.
I don’t have a really—to be honest with you, it's just something that I think we face
in life.
I'll tell you though.
For the most part, I have survived these.
It's not like it doesn’t get hard sometimes.
I mean I got to go, especially—you know, I make it hard on myself.
I mean my life is definitely hard by my own creation.
I've got—I run 40 miles a week and lift and eat one meal a day, and I work pretty
damn hard on my stuff and do all these YouTube videos.
There's definitely a lot that's going on.
I have high expectations of myself.
There's definitely that.
There's definitely a lot pressure, but I definitely don’t want to sabotage myself and destroy
myself and destroy the things that I've built.
Like I said, I have survived these before.
I thought it would be interesting to talk about how I'm surviving it now, how I've survived
it before and how you can survive it before because—or how you can survive in the future,
because I know that a lot of you probably haven’t survived it, like you have gotten
to that point—I mean have you ever gotten to a point in life where things were going
good and you were really successful or more successful than you've been and then you,
for some reason, sabotage yourself, self-destructive behavior.
You do something.
Your diet is going well and you just go and eat like a pig.
Relationships going well, you sabotage that relationship.
Whatever it is, somehow you destroy.
You're going to get really good grades in school.
You decide to somehow destroy that as well or drop out of school.
Whatever it is or starting a business, or starting a project or whatever it is that
you decide that you destroy it.
Why and how do you stop that?
For me, the biggest thing is to recognize that I'm doing some self-destructive behavior.
Now, that alone doesn’t change my attitude towards it.
I'm still like "Fuck it, I still want to destroy this," but at least when I'm recognizing it
then I can realize that I'm not acting in my rational mind, how I normally would think
and act.
That's the key because once I know that—because now—see, I can feel one way, but I can at
a metacognitive level think about it from the abstract and think in a different way.
Right now, I don’t feel like doing this video.
I'll be totally honest with you.
I don’t feel like being here.
I don’t want to go for my fucking run.
I just want to eat some cake.
I don’t want to like do a diet thing and do my kickboxing.
I don’t care if I get fat.
All of these things, they're running through my head.
I don’t care.
I just want to like play some video games and relax, and whatever and take a nap.
That's how I feel right now.
I feel like I'm stupid blabbering in front of the camera all of these things, but my
mind knows that this is not real, that this is kind of some bullshit that you're coming
up with, John.
For whatever reason it is, you're doing it because I can look at my past self and the
things that I've done in life and the achievements I've made and I can see that that's not the
normal pattern.
That's the normal John.
John is in self-destructive mode right.
John needs to kind of be baby-sat by the mind.
You see what I'm saying?
Like the emotional John needs to take a back seat.
"Okay, it's cool.
I understand that you feel this way.
It's cool.
But guess what?
You're going to fucking run, anyway.
Okay, yeah.
That's fucking and you've just got to do it.
You're going to fucking go to the gym.
You're going to eat your diet plan and whether you like it or not.
You need to do the work you need to do.
You might not have the enthusiasm that you'd like to have or that I 'd like you to have,
but that's fine.
You're still going to do it.
When that enthusiasm comes back, that will be great."
See, the thing is, you know, I've talked about this in various forms.
I did this video on holding the line.
You could equate this to the same thing.
I mean you could say that this is holding the line.
It essentially is.
What you're trying to do is you're just trying to—it's like—think of it this way.
It's like Bruce Banner turns into Hulk.
The thing is like the goal is when—when Hulk is out, don’t let him destroy too much
shit in the laboratory.
You know what I mean?
Like how can we like keep him from—he's uncontrollable, like don’t try and change
the Hulk, but let's try and like—like can we chain him up?
Can we put him in a box?
Can we like pad the room?
Can we prevent him from doing damage when he is the Hulk because we don’t know when
he's going to transform back?
We can't necessarily control that transformation.
The same thing happens with us.
I can't necessarily control this to some degree.
Some days you're going to feel depressed.
You're going to feel like shit.
You're going to feel self-destructive and sometimes it's just going to go on for some
period of time.
Yeah, you can take some medication and say that you don’t need to be on pills.
That's not a really good solution either.
You don’t know when this is going to happen.
What you can do is you contain yourself when you're in that state.
I'm not going to be in this state forever.
I know it.
I know that someday when I wake up out of this coma, when I'm not the Hulk anymore and
I'm Bruce Banner again, that I'm going to have to deal with the consequences that Hulk
created.
This is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Same type of thing.
I think that story is actually a story about what I'm talking about.
I think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is sort of about what exists in all of us.
The thing is you have to remember and I have to remind myself that, "Hey, I'm going to
wake up.
I'm going to be Bruce Banner.
When I am and I'm no longer the Hulk, I am going to either—I'm going to have one of
two reactions.
One, I'm going to be relieved that the Hulk didn’t smash everything, or, two, I'm going
to be like, 'Fuck.
Now, I got to clean up all these pieces.
Man, why did I do this again?
Oh, gosh?
Why couldn’t I just like—ugh.
Why couldn't I just like leave the shit intact?
Why didn’t I have to go and destroy this shit?
Now, I got to start over.
Man, I'm never getting anywhere in my life because I'm always starting over and always
cleaning up after the Hulk."
You see what I'm saying?
I think I'll—if you're honest with yourself, a lot of you, maybe that's you.
Maybe that's you, is you're always—everytime you transform into the Hulk or Mr. Hyde, you
destroy all the shit you created as Bruce Banner.
You got to realize this and you got to stop doing this.
You got to start saying like, "The only way to do to stop this from happening is to do
damage control when you're the Hulk."
You can't prevent yourself from being the Hulk.
That's a ridiculous strategy because you know that that transformation is going to happen
at some period of time.
You're going to have ups and downs in life.
What you can absolutely do is you can develop the discipline.
This is where the rubber meets the road, guys.
This is really the fucking bulldog mindset.
Let's queue up the bulldog video, but this is where it really counts.
Again, it's not that you're on your fucking A game all the time.
Some days I'm on top of the world.
I am on my A game.
Now, usually, I can tell you one other thing here.
I'll side note this, which is the times when I am on my A game is when I have created a
momentum, a track record of success behind me.
Success begets success.
If you think about it, the way to get into that good state, that enthusiastic state,
that is going to be the kick-ass state, is when you're in the shit state like fucking
do what you're supposed to do anyway to make progress to the point where you can stand
on top of the mountain.
You can be like, "Yeah."
Right?
That's what's most like that they kick you out of that state and kick you into the good
state.
Ultimately, it comes down to having that discipline, having that mindset to say, "Look, no matter
what, I am not going to destroy everything I created just because I feel like shit right
now for the day, because I feel like shit for the week.
Whatever is causing me to create this self-destructive behavior, pattern or thought pattern, I'm
going to try and snap out of it.
That's great, but I'm going to make sure that the damage is controlled until I do.
If I don't, if I don't snap out of it, then okay.
Fine.
I'm at least holding this off for a week.
I'm at least holding for a week."
That's the motto.
That's the mantra that I tell myself.
I don’t always perfectly do it.
I usually don’t make a huge amount of forward progress when I'm in one of these self-destructive
states.
If I can just prevent myself from punching too many holes on the wall, that's a plus.
That's less walls that I have to plaster when I wake up from the coma.
You guys know what I'm saying?
Does that make sense?
Okay.
Again, I'm putting this out here for you guys because one is honest.
I kind of hate to make these videos because I'm like, "Whoa.
Is John going to make a video saying that he's having crisis every single couple of
weeks or months, or something?"
I guess so because that's how life is.
You go up and down and you have these dips and stuff.
I'm making these videos because I want you guys to realize that this is the condition.
This is a human condition.
This is not something medically wrong with you.
This is not something that is bad about you because I go through this shit.
You see it.
You see it on these videos and then you see it in—I just have to trust.
I have to trust the process.
I have to trust that I'm going to come out of this and I have to trust myself and the
discipline that I've built that it's worth it.
It's worth putting forth that effort when you don't feel like it to prevent yourself
from punching those holes on the wall.
All right.
That's all I got for you today.
I've sort of beat this horse to death, but I hope you found this useful.
Make sure you click that Subscribe button if you haven't already and click the bell
to make sure you don’t miss any videos.
I'll talk to you next time.
Take care.