- There was a time where I almost gave up YouTube.
It was a pretty dark time in my life.
And I was off YouTube for a while and figured like,
in some ways I didn't think anyone would care
if I didn't come back.
I was like, no one really wants to hear what I gotta say.
Some people in the comments now might be
people still don't wanna hear what you have to say.
But yeah it's like,
you look at someone who has had a moderate amount of success
such as I on this platform
and you think that must have been such a fun, easy thing,
he must have been dedicated the whole way.
I almost knocked over my camera just now,
but it's like, nah, there was a period where I was like,
maybe I'll just never go back to it.
There's a few times where I almost didn't go back to it
and believe it or not, there are even times occasionally now
where it's like,
is this worth it?
And of course the answer is yes, duh,
but I'm saying It's just like, sometimes stuff gets to you.
Sometimes life gets to you
and it makes you think if something was just different now,
if things were just changed around a bit it would be better.
And what I'm doing now, isn't the ideal.
And maybe I could find the ideal thing doing something else.
What that really is like grass is greener
kind of thinking.
You can do it in any area of life.
And whenever you get into a situation,
it'll have its ups and downs and certainly some situations
are not good overall,
but even in the best most ideal things
like having a great job that you love to do,
you'll occasionally have moments where you're like,
this is not the ideal cause life isn't ideal.
And then the other side of that is there are times
where you just wanna quit.
It's almost like you don't even think the grass is greener
somewhere else.
You're just like, I'm done with this.
I'm getting too old for this ass
or maybe not too old, but just to run down,
too tired, to like you just don't wanna deal
with the same aggravations over and over again.
But the thing is that life will always have those
rough patches
or those elements that will always give you some difficulty.
And like, when I wanted to quit a couple of years ago,
if I had done that my life,
like that would have been a terrible decision,
but in the moment it was like, I just couldn't see it.
I couldn't see beyond it was like I was down
and I felt like I was gonna have to crawl with all my might
just to get out of it.
And there've been so many times where I've told myself
I'm done.
I even looked at like a journal entry I wrote
a couple of years ago when I was at that low point
and I wrote the words
or this isn't gonna be exact,
but I wrote something like I'm done,
like my YouTube channel is dead, it's finished.
And my channel has like more than a hundred times
the amount of subscribers it had then,
wait, is that true?
No, 10 times the amount.
Yes, 100 times It'd be like in the millions.
Yeah, but it's like grown exponentially since then.
It went from being something that was just kind of a job,
not even a job, but a little gig on the side
to being something that's my job.
And I point this out to show you that
a lot of times we wanna give up in many areas of life
and success is oftentimes beyond the point.
It's always beyond the point of wanting to give up.
You get down, you can't see it and you just keep going.
I think that's what it is that the people who succeed
are just the people who keep going and it's statistically,
the people who stop 0% of the time, can they succeed?
But the people who keep going, at least they have a shot.
Success is somewhere in front of them.
And while this is a Thoughtful Thursday video,
let's stop momentarily
and see if YouTube will show a commercial.
I appreciate you sitting through that.
So maybe there's something in your life
where you're ready to give up.
You think you're done,
you think you're finished,
you think you've hit the bottom
and you're just ready to throw in the towel
with whatever it is,
whatever your vision is for your future,
with whatever you love to do,
or you feel scared to try the next step to move on with it.
And so much of that crap is just in our minds.
All that stuff I was telling myself, oh, I should quit,
my channel's done, was not reality.
That was just all in my mind, fabrication.
So much stuff I like.
I'm talking to a lot of people
and happened to be hearing about a lot of their,
kind of insecurities you might say,
the things that are holding them back in life,
their dreams that they wanna achieve,
but they can't move forward.
And it always comes back to the same thing.
It's like, there's something that's sort of real,
but then their mind blows it out of proportion
and that's the thing they get stuck on.
We all feel fear and don't wanna take huge risks
and fear is to a degree, something real,
but then our mind says it's really, really real
whereas it's just sort of like a caution,
like stop for a second, think about it.
Okay, then go.
People who have so much talent and potential
hold themselves back, which is what I did for so many years
and what I almost did fatally to my YouTube channel.
And I think at a certain point, I was just like,
I have to going just as an experiment
to see if it will go anywhere.
So maybe that's how you could view life.
It's a big experiment.
See what you can get out of it.
It's just like really kills me so many people
that if I was just controlling their life,
I could tell them what to do.
And it's the same with other people in my life.
But when you're controlling your own life,
then the risks, especially when it comes to
what will people think of me?
And what will happen to if things go wrong,
what will happen to my life?
Which are legitimate I'm not saying take stupid risks.
But so much of it is made up.
Something I've realized is that almost all
self help stuff just comes back to this one thing,
everything is made up.
Everything, like the people who succeed in life,
just realize it, just one day you get it.
Maybe that's what, everything is.
Enlightening, awakening, becoming your best self.
They're just realizing most everything is fake.
All the stuff in our head and everything that holds us back,
everything that we tell ourselves is a reason
for not doing what we want to do.
It's all fake, it's all made up,
it's all an illusion.
That's, it's a startling thing,
but it's easy to realize that
and then go back to your own life and be like,
nah, I'm not gonna move forward.
Yeah, I know it's not real.
I know the fear is out of proportion,
but it's actually really real I'm feeling it.
So like this last weekend,
I went up in the mountains with my boys
and we went to a scenic overlook.
I'll show some pictures here
and you see there's a wall there.
Oh wall, Oh sweet, Oh lovely wall.
And standing behind the wall, looking at the scenery,
I felt a little nervous,
like heights bother me a little bit,
but I was okay.
But then we went down a little further
where there wasn't a wall,
where there was a drop off and if you slipped,
you'd have to kind of intentionally
go to the edge and be reckless and fall off.
But we went down there and I was standing like 20 feet away
from the edge, but I still felt afraid.
And some of the other guys were going closer to the edge
and I was like, they're gonna fall
I gotta be the dad here to be like,
okay guys, get away from that,
get away from the edge, please.
Someone's gotta stand up and tell you the safe thing to do,
but no one was any in any real danger.
Yes there was some danger,
some of the fear I was feeling was legitimate.
'Cause it's like, you don't want to fall to your death.
But on the other hand,
the actual percentage chance of any of us falling
because of, it wasn't very steep,
you'd really have to be trying.
It was minuscule.
The risk was actually very small.
So I had the inclination to turn around and leave
and just cause I was like, I'll let them do their thing,
but I can't look at this anymore.
I can't stand by while we risk our lives.
But then I was like, I realized, no, this is fake.
This is not something real.
There is an element of reality to it
but this fear that's driving me to want to turn away
is ultimately blown out of proportion by my mind.
So I forced myself to just stay there
and I focused on that feeling of fear,
and I focused on that unpleasant jittery feeling of anxiety
in my chest.
And I was like, I'm just gonna stand here
and I'm gonna deal with it.
So I think it's good in your life to realize
the things that are and are not real.
What's holding you back?
It's probably a lot of stuff
and it probably feels super real,
but as I've phrased, I've become fond of is
feelings aren't facts.
Like your brain sends you a lot of feelings
that seem to be telling you something,
but they're not necessarily telling you anything.
And just because you think something
doesn't mean that it is true.
That's my long drawn out thought for today.
Tune in tomorrow for funny video.